Nutrition Expert, Kenya at ACDI/VOCA

Job description

Tanager, an ACDI/VOCA affiliate, is promptly seeking an experienced Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture Expert for Impacting Gender & Nutrition through Innovative Technical Exchange in Agriculture (IGNITE) project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This 5-year project will improve household nutrition and women's empowerment by strengthening African institutions' ability to integrate nutrition and gender in agriculture interventions and business practices.

The Nutrition Expert will provide thought leadership on the development of tools, resources, and models that will facilitate the integration of nutrition into agriculture interventions. S/he will lead provision of technical services to IGNITE clients, supporting them to design, implement, and monitor nutrition-sensitive business strategies and agriculture activities in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Tanzania.

Responsibilities

• Lead the analysis of research and field assessments to identify nutrition-sensitive approaches that increase consumption of safe, nutritious food.
• Co-create the design and implementation of interventions that increase household production, access to, purchase, and consumption of nutrient-rich foods.
• Apply gender best practices to introduce innovative approaches to address barriers to intrahousehold allocation of food and joint decision making over household nutrition, income expenditure, and production decisions.
• Develop and test tools that integrate both gender and nutrition into the design and implementation of agriculture activities.
• Design and conduct participatory training and workshops on nutrition-sensitive agriculture for clients.
• Support clients on development, refinement, and/or roll-out of nutrition-sensitive business policies and procedures.
• Contribute to development of case studies that make the business case for integrating nutrition into agriculture activities and business plans.
• Collaborate with evaluation partners in designing tools and evaluations that identify most effective and efficient models for increasing equitable consumption of safe, affordable, nutritious food year-round.
• Support identification of local service providers; conduct trainings and other capacity building activities for identified local service providers; accompany local service providers in providing technical support to IGNITE clients.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Master's degree in nutrition, public health, or a relevant discipline.
• Minimum of 8 years of progressively responsible experience in sub-Saharan Africa, in at least 3 different countries; including a minimum of five years' experience facilitating training on nutrition-sensitive agriculture, leading nutrition analysis, and identifying nutrition-sensitive interventions for agriculture programs or organizations; OR an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Demonstrated experience integrating nutrition into agriculture projects and knowledge of nutrition-sensitive agriculture concepts in sub-Saharan Africa; experience in West and East Africa preferred.
• Demonstrated knowledge of and proven successful ability to design and conduct trainings and workshops and lead interviews, focus groups, and other formative research methodologies
• Demonstrated knowledge of social and behavior change communication theory and techniques.
• Understanding of gender-integrated agriculture concepts in Africa and ability to integrate a gender lens into nutrition-sensitive approaches.
• Experience working with agricultural market systems, rural producers, farmers' associations, agribusinesses, private sector agricultural production, marketing, or sales, and/or governments.
• Strong analytical skills, including ability to gather and analyze a variety of information pertaining to issues and to develop appropriate recommendations for action.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including demonstrated ability to write required documents in a clear, concise, well-organized manner.
• Fluency in English, written and oral, required; French language skills strongly desired.
• Ability to travel in Sub-Saharan Africa for up to 40%.