The Bilateral Ethiopia – Netherlands Effort for Food, Income and Trade (BENEFIT)
Job description
Category: Agricultural development, Project management
Location: Mekelle, Woldia, Bahir Dar and Haramaya
Career Level: Mid-career Level (5+ years’ experience)
Employment Type: Full time
Salary: Based on the Scale of BENEFIT experts.
Background
The Bilateral Ethiopia Netherlands Effort for Food Income and Trade (BENEFIT) partnership is a portfolio of five programmes (ISSD Ethiopia, CASCAPE, ENTAG, SBN and REALISE), which is funded by the Government of the Kingdom of Netherlands through its Embassy in Addis Ababa. REALISE: ‘Realising Sustainable Agricultural Livelihood Security in Ethiopia’ is the new programme under BENEFIT. REALISE Programme is designed to take the achievements of CASCAPE (Capacity building for Scaling up of evidence-based best Practices in Agricultural Production’ (CASCAPE) programme and the ‘Integrated Seed Sector Development’ (ISSD) Ethiopia programme to new areas and target groups in Ethiopia.
REALISE is a three – year (2018-2020) programme that will align with the Government of Ethiopia’s (GoE) Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP). This GoE flagship programme currently reaches 8 million chronically food insecure Ethiopians with a wide array of instruments to smooth consumption, prevent asset depletion and promote livelihood diversification including uptake of improved agricultural practices. REALISE aims to take lessons learned from the Wageningen University & Research, CASCAPE and ISSD Ethiopia programmes to PSNP target woredas.
The goal of the REALISE programme is: ‘Enhanced human, organisational and institutional capacities to adapt, validate and scale best fit practices to improve the resilience of chronically food insecure households in PSNP woredas. REALISE’s goal is to be achieved through four primary outcomes:
- Developed best fit practices that meet expressed needs and have the potential to contribute to increased productivity and resilience are available for scaling in selected PSNP Woredas;
- Increased availability, timely delivery and use of quality seed of new, improved, and/or farmer preferred varieties through diverse channels;
- Enhanced human, organizational and institutional capacities for matching, adapting, validating and scaling best fit practices; and
- A conducive environment exists for the institutionalisation of evidence-based system innovations.
The implementation model is based on the experiences of the CASCAPE and ISSD Ethiopia programmes in that REALISE will partner with the Regional Agricultural Research Institutes, Bureaus of Agriculture and Livestock Resources/food security offices and a number of Ethiopian Universities that will each manage so called clusters: Hawassa, Haramaya, Arsi, Bahir Dar, Woldia and Mekelle. There are two satellite Universities: Odabultum University that will collaborate with Haramaya University and Arbaminch University that will collaborate with Hawassa University. The REALISE programme will validate and scale best fit practices, will assure the availability of quality seed, will train related GoE and NGO partners in the proper scaling of the practices and will work with its partners towards the institutionalisation of evidence-based system innovations.