Agricultural Marketing Specialist - Component Lead

Agricultural Marketing Specialist - Component Lead

I. PROGRAM SUMMARY

The Food Production, Processing & Marketing activity (FPPM) is a five-year, USAID-funded program and is expected to run through May 2016. The purpose of FPPM, aligned with the US President’s Feed the Future strategy, is to instigate broad-based agricultural growth in three provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): Bandundu, Bas-Congo, and Kinshasa.

FPPM comprises three specific objectives/components: 1) Increasing Agricultural Productivity - increasing the productivity of tens of thousands of smallholders in Bandundu, Bas Congo, and Kinshasa Provinces; 2) Improving Market Efficiency  - improving the efficiency of aggregators, traders, processors, transporters, and market operators who supply the urban populations; and, 3) Developing Capacity to Respond to Market Opportunities– improving the capacity of community-based organizations, associations, cooperatives, and small and medium enterprises to respond to market opportunities along the value chains.

Working with producer organizations, public and private partnerships (PPPs), and other donors, FPPM is facilitating the access of smallholder groups to inputs, services, and markets, enabling smallholder farms to become income-generating businesses. As the managers of these businesses, both men and women, learn how to supply rural and urban markets, they increase opportunities for on-farm and off-farm employment, enhancing household food security and economic resilience. In the coming months, FPPM will address quantitative and qualitative losses in the postharvest and processing stages through cooperation with these smallholder groups.

Responsibilities

1. Provide overall technical leadership and direction to Component 2- Improved Market Efficiency. Provision of technical leadership for project activities directed at increasing market and processing opportunities and market efficiency includes:

1. Ensuring proper planning,  phasing, coordination and implementation of marketing activities and sub-components, both with each other and with those of other project components, mastering the spatial dynamics that align production increases with market opportunities through market  development, promotion and information services, and needed improvements in aggregation, storage and processing facilities
2. Ensuring marketing activities are aligned with the production and capacity building / enterprise development components and based on sound  economic and market analysis to ensure long term viability
3. Addressing issues related to post harvest handling, aggregation, storage, transport, conditioning and sales to the Kinshasa market through investments, partnerships, collaboration and innovation
4. Supporting processing industries and producer marketing groups/associations to do business in new innovative ways, to adopt cost saving technology and to produce and diversify product offerings
5. Linking upgrades in processing to market opportunities, capacity reinforcement and improved access to financing
6. Guiding interventions, training and grants focused on SME activity in targeted farm to market chains (Cassava, Maize, Peanuts and Beans-Soy, Cowpea, Beans and regions (Bas Congo, Bandundu and the Plateau de Batéké)
7. Ensuring women's involvement in the value chains through Community Organization, planning and management
8. Leveraging partnerships with other development actors to promote positive synergies leading to cost effective implementation of program initiatives and the achievement of our goals, objectives and deliverables

2. Negotiate Alliances with private sector/SME partners to spur investments and collaborative activities with project staff and partners

1. Use incubation grants to spur SME's
2. Use innovation grants to spur technology adoption
3. Use institutional strengthening grants to strengthen the capacity of implementing partners of all sizes and at all levels of the targeted value chains
4. Match farm to market participants to financial services
5. Work with SME lending authorities at commercial banks and MFI to develop appropriate products for micro, small and medium sized borrowers at all levels in targeted value chains

3. Monitor sectorial policies and regulations affecting the agricultural sector, particularly the cultivation, transformation and trade of food crops

1. Promote institutional investments in certified laboratory facilities that can certify food processing facilities/operations, water sources and food products as being safe from contamination.
4. Examine business/trade enabling environment and identify areas of intervention to be addressed through practical solutions
5. Examine opportunities to expand rural women's employment in food processing and manufacturing
6. Introduce new technologies
7. Research end markets, segmenting market demand and market requirements
8. Identify the needs of women to improve market penetration
9. Disseminate pertinent information along supply chains
10. Encourage supply chain participants to become more responsive to market demand
11. Improve market access, market information, market infrastructure and market linkages
12. Track changes in transportation/logistics systems including the opening of primary and access roads, dredging and signal buoying of river transport; identification and outreach to transport companies and groups; and analysis of back-haul opportunities
13. Assure timely, organized, integrated, quantifiable reporting on component 2 activities, initiatives, results, lessons learned, success stories and synergies
14. Ensure that the implementation strategy follows the work plan and manage the integrated Component 2 team in such a way that fosters feedback and collective participation (group-thinking) and buy in in the implementation of the marketing strategy
15. Any tasks requested by COP that will lead to better integration and articulation of technical activities among and between components and among and between provincial offices and teams in your areas of responsibility and technical expertise.

Required Qualifications:

• At least 10 years of experience in agricultural development , with an emphasis on agricultural marketing
• Proven work experience in business plan development, market research and analysis of agricultural commodities
• Prior experience developing either GDA or Public Private Partnerships
• Prior work with staple food crop  value chains
• Demonstrated abilities to design and implement market-responsive interventions that help supply chains grow
• Ability to analyze quantitatively, to develop cost models, to synthesize and present data in a clear, concise manner
• Advanced degree in an economics, agricultural economics, business or related field is required. 
• Experience leading high performing small groups of host country nationals
• Oral and written fluency in English and French required.
• Prior work experience in the DRC and with USAID is preferred.
  
  
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