Research Officer II: Actuary at International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)

Key Responsibilities:

•  Research for Development
  • Lead the development of innovative insurance and other financial products including bundled solutions for extensive, semi-intensive, and intensive livestock systems.
  • Generate timely index reports for the indexed financial products.
  • Lead and contribute to research on quality improvement of financial products, especially on product pricing and related tools.
  • Manage the data collection process and conduct advanced analysis of complex datasets using geospatial techniques.
  • Lead project report writing and co-author peer review publications.
  • Contribute to the project’s activities on related aspects/ themes under the guidance of the supervisor.
•  Partnerships and Stakeholder engagement
  • Contribute towards strengthening existing partnerships and identifying new and innovative partnerships towards sharing and implementation of research findings with different stakeholders.
  • Contribute to the engagement with institutional stakeholders, including private sector actors and high-level government representatives to inform about climate risk financing.
•  Capacity Development and Knowledge Management
  • In conjunction with the scientist, plan, survey and coordinate the materials and resources. required to meet the research objectives of the group.
  • Collect, store and curate data generated from the analytics.
  • Review existing course of actions and support in the development of proposals, milestones and implementation of research.
  • Prepare and assure quality of project reports and papers for presentation.
  • Ensure timely delivery of geospatial products for projects as and when assigned.
  • Actively support resource mobilization activities by contributing to proposal writing and creating new opportunities.

Requirements

• Master’s degree in actuarial science, statistics, finance or other related discipline with at least 5 years’ relevant work experience on financial products development and application of remote sensing and GIS on agriculture/ natural resources.
• Advanced analytical techniques for the design of innovative indemnity, indexed, and hybrid financial products, especially related to pricing.
• Experience of statistical analysis and logical development of models.
• Experience with index calculation and reporting for indexed financial products.
• Experience with the geospatial analysis of remotely sensed datasets.
• Experience of working with multi spectral satellites. 
• Proven knowledge of field data collection for geospatial analysis.   
• Has good working knowledge of remote sensing and GIS software, Database and  software such as Arc GIS, ENVI and e-Cognition.
• Substantial experience in scripting such as R/ Python and Google Earth Engine.
• Strong written and oral communication skills in English with the ability to communicate with diverse audiences.
• Proven ability to work in multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural teams with minimal supervision, and experience working across disciplines and different cultural backgrounds.
• Willingness to travel frequently to rural and remote areas of project sites in different countries.
• Record of publications and experience with resource mobilization and contributing to project proposals would be an asset.
• Communication skills for peer reviewed publications
• Programmming skills using R/ Python/ Stata