FAO Afghanistan is investing, across all 34 provinces, in resilience reinforcing actions that focus on protecting agriculture livelihoods and local ecosystems, boosting local production of nutritious foods and cash-incomes, and safeguarding critical agriculture sectoral development gains achieved over the past couple of decades through revitalizing rural markets and economy. In 2022-2023, FAO will, under the life-saving assistance Outcome (1) of the UN Transitional Engagement Framework (TEF), focus on the following four priority actions: (i) Safeguarding Wheat Seed Security, (ii) Enhancing Local Production of Nutritious Food, (iii) Livestock Protection and Dairy Sector Support, and (iv) Restoring Irrigation Structures to Boost Cash Incomes. Additionally, FAO will contribute towards resilience building activities under Outcome 2 of the TEF.
Reporting Lines
The Assessment Coordination Specialist will work under the overall supervision of the FAO Representative, the technical supervision of the Emergency and Rehabilitation Officer and Head of Risk Analysis, Agriculture and Food Security and direct supervision M&E Specialist (Data in Emergencies Country Analyst).
Technical Focus
The Assessment Coordination Specialist will be part of the Risk Analysis, Agriculture and Food Security Unit. The incumbent will contribute to designing, implementation, coordination and reporting of FAO Afghanistan‘s food security and livelihoods assessments including surveillance or monitoring systems, post-disaster needs assessments, damage and losses assessments, agricultural production assessment, risk and hazards profiling, market analysis, and/or value chain analysis.
Tasks and responsibilities
Support development of country roadmaps, assessment concept notes and annual workplan, and regularly liaise with the country management team and the regional assessment advisors on the alignment with the strategic, technical, and operational requirements.
Contribute to designing of survey instruments including questionnaires design, programming of digital tools, questionnaire testing and piloting and translations by adapting the standard tools to the country circumstances.
Support development of sample design proposals using standard sampling approaches and develop sampling documents.
Contribute to development of training material (lesson plans, presentations, pre-tests and post-tests) for enumerators and supervisors’ training/workshop for any assessment and conduct training to improve capacity of enumerators and supervisors to ensure high quality data are collection from the field.
Coordinate data collection with partners and monitor data quality including continuous control of interim datasets, audio recordings, Geo Points, field spot checks) and contribute to development of data quality reports.
Contribute to data cleaning, quality checks, data analysis and preparation of the analysis output (including weights, statistical analysis and qualitative analysis) and facilitate results validation by a panel of internal experts before publication and validate with secondary sources.
Contribute the exploration and interpretation of DIEM - Data in Emergencies dashboards on the staging hub, including the formulation of highlights and operational recommendations.
Contribute to the production of various analytical products including reports, presentations, meta-analyses, and Story Maps, using standard templates.
Contribute to the dissemination of results and promotion of the DIEM - Data in Emergencies Hub. It can include hub demos and presentations of the survey findings to FAO country teams, donors, or Food Security cluster partners.
Ensure the availability of data for other processes such as IPC, Anticipatory Action scenario building, response analysis, programming exercises, Humanitarian Needs Overview, and CO learning agenda and meet urgent data request by CO management, donors, partners, and users.
Coordinate with partners and conduct learning workshops and document lessons learnt and data uses;
Provide technical inputs for development of agricultural livelihood risk profiles in Afghanistan and baselines of past events and their impacts on agricultural livelihoods.
Develop impact assessment preparedness plan for the main hazards identified in the country.
Contribute to presentation of the assessments design and results for FAO management and other stakeholders.
Perform any other duties as required.
Candidates Will Be Assessed Against The Following
Minimum Requirements
Advanced (Masters) degree or University (Bachelor) degree in Agriculture, Economics, Development Studies, Data Science or closely related field;
For advanced degree at least five (5) years of relevant work experience in Agriculture, Economics, Development Studies, Data Science;
For university degree at least seven (7) years of relevant work experience in Agriculture, Economics, Development Studies, Data Science;
Working knowledge (level C) of English and local languages (Pashto and Dari);
National of Afghanistan.
Technical/Functional Skills
Proven experience in national assessment/survey design, implementation and coordination, qualitative and quantitative data collection methodologies, data management, analysis, visualization, and knowledge of online dashboards/Hub.
Experience or familiarity with food security and livelihoods assessments methodologies, including surveillance or monitoring systems, post-disaster needs assessments, damage and losses assessments, agricultural production assessment, risk and hazards profiling, market analysis, and/or value chain analysis.
Ability to conduct data quality assurance during and after the assessment/surveys including coding and running syntaxes.
Strong analytical skills, results interpretation, and communication for wide ranges of data and information users.
Knowledge of agriculture, food security, livelihoods, food systems and value chains in the context of Afghanistan.
Ability to work under pressure and adapt to an evolving and complex humanitarian context and within multidisciplinary and different cultural background teams.
Working knowledge of advanced statistics with ability to use statistical software packages (in particular SPSS , STATA and/or R, ArcGIS);
Experience in using and programming questionnaires in digital data collection tools (Kobo toolbox, ODK, Fulcrum and Survey CTO);
Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written.
Coordination skills with strong individual planning capacity.
Knowledge of humanitarian principles.
Strong professional command of Microsoft Office, in particular Excel and PowerBI.
Previous work experience with the UN is an advantage.
