Research Associate at International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)

Job description

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) seeks to recruit a Research Associate to support sustainable livelihood options for dryland populations. The successful applicant will play a central role in supporting, managing, and implementing the research operations of the team. The candidate will also support team scientists with data analysis and writing to exploit the rich existing data and contribute to writing scientific papers.

ILRI works to improve food and nutritional security and reduce poverty in developing countries through research for efficient, safe and sustainable use of livestock. It is the only one of 15 CGIAR research centres dedicated entirely to animal agriculture research for the developing world. Co-hosted by Kenya and Ethiopia, it has regional or country offices and projects in East, South and Southeast Asia as well as Central, East, Southern and West Africa. www.ilri.org

The position

This position will be part of the Index Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) team as it works to support sustainable livelihood options for dryland populations. The team’s original research for development agenda focused on mitigating the negative effects of drought on pastoralists by developing and scaling index insurance for pastoralists in the Horn of Africa. The IBLI team has recently added “improving access to information from and in remote, data-scarce, pastoral regions” as a second development agenda. Currently, efforts associated with this new agenda rely on collecting local information, processing those data, often by cleaning and integrating them with additional sources of data, and then disseminating the information (e.g., to policy makers, pastoralist).

Responsibilities

• Provide research and analytical support to project scientist and contribute to research papers
• Engage with stakeholders and policy makers to present our findings and further our agenda
• Write research reports summarizing and analysing data
• Contribute to the team’s research for development agenda (research design and strategy, survey instruments, sampling frame, survey implementation strategy, enumerator training, data collection and analysis
• Oversee management of project data: data cleaning, data inventory and storage, data analysis
• Writing and updating survey data code books that fully describe the research and survey design, data collection methods, cleaning and inventory processes
• Contribute to communication, dissemination of research findings which should include participation in meetings and workshops, giving periodic presentations to participating institutions, and communicating to policy makers through web and popular media

Requirements

• A Master’s degree in Economics, Development Economics, and Agriculture Economics, Statistics or other related discipline
• At least 3 years of relevant experience in research for development
• Minimum 2 years of experience in quantitative and qualitative household level socio-economic data collection and analysis; experience must involve field worked survey implementation as well as data analysis and report writing
• Experience with statistical packages (R, SPSS, STATA)
• Excellent computer skills in Microsoft packages
• Excellent communications skills and ability to engage well with stakeholders
• Experience in presenting and reporting on research outputs
• Experience working in the field in remote locations

Terms of Appointment

This is a Nationally Recruited Staff (NRS) position based at ILRI’s Nairobi campus. It is open to Kenyan nationals only. The position is on a 3-year contract, renewable subject to satisfactory performance and availability of funding.

Job Level

This position is at job level 2D and open to Kenyan nationals only. ILRI offers a competitive salary and benefits package which includes; pension, medical and other insurances for ILRI’s Nationally Recruited Staff.