Food Security and Agricultural Livelihoods Assessment Specialist

Overview

Conduct needs assessment activities for food security and agricultural livelihoods.

You have:

• National of Lebanon
• Bachelor in agronomy, rural statistics, agricultural economics, relevant social or natural sciences, or other related discipline relevant to the mandate of the Organization
• Minimum of 5 years of proven knowledge and experience in assessments, surveillance systems, or monitoring and evaluation in the context of emergencies and food crises
• Working knowledge of English and Arabic. French is an Asset

Organizational Setting

In recent years, Lebanon has faced multiple protracted crises, including the influx of Syrian refugees and an ongoing economic crisis characterized by high unemployment, increasing poverty, rapid inflation, and currency devaluation. This situation has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic creating overlapping economic and health crises.

As these crises continue to evolve, continuous monitoring and early warning is critical to inform humanitarian and resilience programming and guide anticipatory actions to counter adverse impacts of the crisis on food security and food systems, in particular for households engaged in agriculture.

The FAO Lebanon Office is in charge of preparing for and effectively responding to food and agricultural threats and crises, with the support from the Office of Emergency and Resilience (OER). As part of the OER, the Needs Assessment team is in charge of generating quality and timely evidence to inform decision-making and programming, including anticipatory action and emergency response through three work streams:

• A dynamic monitoring system of agricultural livelihoods and food security in the context of various shocks, consisting of periodic household and non-household data collection (through phone and in-person surveys) and analysis;
• Ex-post assessments of the impacts of shocks on agricultural livelihoods and value chains, using phased methodological approaches such as remote-sensing, damage & loss analyses, Post-Disaster Needs Assessments (PDNA), and other food security & livelihood surveys.
• Risk profiles, which are derived from geographic baselines of past events and their impacts on agricultural livelihoods.

In close collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture in Lebanon, a first agricultural household survey on food security monitoring was completed in 2021 with the overall objective of this information system was to monitor risks to food security and food systems. An additional phase, planned for 2022, will contribute strengthening and institutionalizing this dynamic context monitoring. To this effect additional households survey rounds will be carried out throughout 2022 and the end goal would be the generation of quality and evidence-based to guide programming and decision-making

Reporting Lines

The Consultant will work under the overall management of the FAO Representative and the technical supervision of the Regional Assessment Adviser. He/ She will work in close collaboration with the global Needs Assessment team and with other country colleagues involved in evidence for programming, especially the FAO Lebanon Programme Associate.

Technical Focus

The Consultant is responsible for coordinating and conducting the needs assessment activities in Lebanon. He is accountable for the timely implementation of activities related to the monitoring system in accordance with the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).

Tasks and responsibilities

The Consultant shall perform the below activities

Monitoring system

• Liaise regularly with the country management team and the Regional Assessment Adviser on the alignment of the roadmap with strategic, technical and operational requirements;
• Develop partnerships for data collection as required, including identification of partners, processing of Letters of Agreement and briefing/training of partners on the monitoring tools;
• Lead the design of the Households’ surveys (instruments, sample, questionnaires, data collection modalities) by using and adapting the standard tools to the country circumstances and roadmap as well as for the Key Informant ones;
• Coordinate data collection with partners (remotely for Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviews, web surveys, or face-to-face) with direct supervision and programming of digital tools for in-person surveys) and monitor data quality (including questionnaire testing and piloting, enumerators training, continuous control of interim datasets, quotas and audio recordings, production of a data quality report);
• Collect and monitor key secondary data and contextual information to inform questionnaire design, sample frames, weights, as well as data validation and interpretation;
• Abide by the data management standards of the monitoring system, including data protection and storage, and hub-related workflow;
• Lead data analysis (including weights, statistical analysis and qualitative analysis);
• Lead the exploration and interpretation of dashboards on the staging hub, including the formulation of highlights and operational recommendations, and facilitate their validation by a panel of internal experts before publication;
• Contribute to the production of various analytical products including reports, presentations, meta-analyses, and StoryMaps, using standard templates;
• Contribute to the dissemination of results and promotion of the Data in Emergencies hub. It can include hub demos and presentations of the survey findings to FAO country teams, Ministry of Agriculture, donors or Food Security and Agriculture Sector partners;
• Ensure the availability of data for other analytical processes such as Emergency and Crisis Responses Frameworks (Lebanon Crisis Reponses Plan and Emergency Response Plan) and participate to these processes as required;
• Promote and monitor the use of data and analytical products, and participate to response analysis as required;
• Document lessons learnt and data uses;
• Participate to global and regional training workshops, and contribute to the worldwide Community of Practice

Impact assessments and risks profiling

• Provide technical inputs to country decision-makers in the aftermath of hazards by proposing a combination of adequate and phased assessment methodologies (remote-sensing, rapid field assessment, Damage & Loss assessment, Post-Disaster Needs Assessment, other thematic assessments);
• Coordinate the implementation of impact assessments with relevant expert units, including the global Geospatial unit and other country units. Field assessments involve the coordination of all steps of the data collection and analysis cycle while remote-sensing analyses imply the definition of areas of interest and objectives, the provision of relevant secondary data, the interpretation of remote-sensing results in light of socio-economic data, and reporting;
• Develop an impact assessment preparedness plan for the main hazards identified in the country. The plan should include the gathering of baseline data, the identification of existing Early Warning Systems to be monitored, the identification of relevant methodologies and potential partners, the contextualization of Standard Operating Procedures, and the briefing/training of relevant country colleagues and partners on the SOPs and tools;
• Contribute to risks profiling exercises, as needed.

CANDIDATES WILL BE ASSESSED AGAINST THE FOLLOWING

Minimum Requirements

• National of Lebanon;
• Bachelor in agronomy, rural statistics, agricultural economics, relevant social or natural sciences, or other related discipline relevant to the mandate of the Organization;
• Minimum of 5 years of proven knowledge and experience in assessments, surveillance systems, or monitoring and evaluation in the context of emergencies and food crises;
• Working knowledge of English and Arabic. French is an Asset;

FAO Core Competencies

• Results Focus
• Teamwork
• Communication
• Building Effective Relationships
• Knowledge Sharing and Continuous Improvement

Technical/Functional Skills

• Ability to work under pressure and adapt to an evolving and complex humanitarian context and within multidisciplinary and different cultural background teams;
• Strong analytical skills and knowledge of agriculture, food security, livelihoods, food systems and value chains in the context of Lebanon;
• 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, market analysis, and/or value chain analysis;
• Experience in survey design, sampling, data collection, data analysis, and interpretation for assessment processes in agriculture and food security;
• Working knowledge of advanced statistics with ability to use statistical software packages (in particular SPSS , STATA and/or R);
• Expertise in remote data collection including phone or web-based surveys and/or remote-sensing would be a plus;
• Experience in using and programming questionnaires in digital data collection tools (Kobo toolbox, ODK);
• Proven data visualization and reporting skills;
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written;
• Coordination skills with strong individual planning capacity;
• Knowledge of humanitarian principles.

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Potential interview questions

Added 4 years ago - Updated 1 year ago - Source: fao.org