Science and Data Lead-Senior Scientist

Key skills

GIS/Remote Sensing

Geography

Modeling

Computer sciences

Bilingual En+Fr

Additional/Preferred Skills

Agronomy

NRM

Hydrology

Climatology

Environmental scienc

Preferred Qualifications

Masters

PhD preferred

The CoP will provide overall leadership, management, and strategic vision to the implementation of the anticipated phase 2 of the USAID-funded SERVIR West Africa activity, to ensure that the program meets its targets and deliverables on- time and within budget. The CoP will supervise program staff and ensure accountability to ICRISAT policies and donor rules and regulations. The CoP will be the primary program representative to donors, relevant government entities, partners, other implementers, and stakeholders. 

Senior Scientist- Science and Data Lead 

ICRISAT seeks application from competent professional for the position of ‘Senior Scientist- Science and Data Lead’ for ‘SERVIR WA – Digital Agriculture’ to support activities of Global Research Program - Resilient Farm and Food Systems (GRP-RF&FS) for the SERVIR-West Africa Program, part of the

SERVIR Global program, a joint development initiative of the National Aeronautics and Space

Administration (NASA) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). This position will be based at Niamey, West Africa.  

ICRISAT is a non-profit, non-political organization that conducts agricultural research for development in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa with a wide array of partners throughout the world. Covering 6.5 million square kilometers of land in 55 countries, the semi- arid or dryland tropics has over 2 billion people and 644 million of these are the poorest of the poor. ICRISAT and its partners help empower these disadvantaged populations to overcome poverty, hunger and a degraded environment through better agricultural production systems.

ICRISAT is headquartered at Patancheru near Hyderabad, India, with two regional hubs and eight country offices in sub-Saharan Africa. ICRISAT envisions a prosperous, food-secure and resilient dryland tropics. Its mission is to reduce poverty, hunger, malnutrition and environmental degradation in the dryland tropics. ICRISAT conducts research on its mandate crops of chickpea, pigeonpea, groundnut, sorghum, pearl millet and finger millet in the arid and semi-arid tropics. The Institute focuses its work on the drylands and in protecting the environment. Tropical dryland areas are usually seen as resource-poor and perennially beset by shocks such as drought, thereby trapping dryland communities in poverty and hunger and making them dependent on external aid. Please visit – www.icrisat.org

Responsibilities:

Service Design and Delivery: 

• Coordinate the program’s scientific and technical aspects of the service design and delivery activities in line with SERVIR-West Africa’s Theory of Change, Strategic Approach and Intermediate Goals.  
• Provide scientific and technical leadership to the Program across the thematic areas, drawing from the SERVIR Planning Toolkit.
• Help organize the PMU to implement the activities set out in the program’s work plan for service design and delivery, to ensure that service delivery progresses in a timely manner.
• Communicate with the program’s Service Leads, who are responsible for supervising individual service design and delivery, to provide scientific backstopping, track program timelines, identify resourcing needs and maintain information quality and control.
• Participate in the user consultation activities and provide technical support to the PMU for the development of user needs assessments, including stakeholder mapping and service idea generation.
• Supervise the program’s Geospatial Information Technology (GIT) implementation, including maintenance of metadata catalogues, ensure data standards and data sharing agreements with consortium members.
• Develop user-driven geospatial information including data, tools, applications, and models, in collaboration with colleagues in the PMU
• Deliver capacity building to Consortium partners including training workshops, technical assistance and planning support, in collaboration with colleagues in the PMU
• Implement a data sharing and open data strategy for the Consortium.
• Support the integration of a gender and social inclusion (GESI) lens into all service design and delivery, in coordination with the support of the program’s GESI Lead
• Facilitate dialogue on technical matters between the PMU and the NASA science team, including the Service Coordination Office (SCO) and Applied Sciences Team (AST), the latter in coordination with the various project co-investigators across the SERVIR West Africa consortium.
• Organize the hub to actively participate to the regular thematic calls related to the SERVIR service areas.
• Organize the hub to have a Tensor Flow working group taking into account the reality of the hub and to better cover the needs from the various communities of practice.
• Contribute technically and scientifically to the attendance of the hub to the science hub exchanges under the lead of NASA/SCO
• Coordinate technical interactions with NASA including communication and participation in all SERVIR-West Africa activities, such as user needs assessment and service design and delivery.

Representation:

•The following responsibilities will be jointly held with colleagues in the PMU and will involve day-to-day coordination with the Project Director, User Engagement Lead and MEL/Knowledge Management/Communications Coordinator

•Represent SERVIR West Africa with governmental and non-governmental stakeholders in the region, including the ability to travel regionally and internationally as required

•Build and manage strong and productive partnerships with NASA, USAID, Consortium members, other SERVIR hubs and other partners to facilitate learning and knowledge exchange across the project partnership

•Participate in regular review meetings with NASA and USAID to communicate the Program’s outputs, outcomes and impact

•Promote the Program with stakeholders, the donor community, and the general public in target countries, in line with the program plans

Operations:

•Comply with USAID and Program requirements including attendance at meetings, development of project deliverables, reports and plans, and respond to ad hoc information requests

•Prepare the service design and delivery sections of the annual workplan and quarterly performance reports under the supervision of the Chief of Party and in coordination with the other members of the PMU

•Take into consideration inputs and recommendations from the GESI Lead

•Ensure that the Program fulfils the scientific and technical stipulations of the Program’s Cooperative Agreement with USAID, with support from the PMU

•Coordinate with the User Engagement Lead to deliver services with Consortium partners

•Support the MEL Coordinator in their responsibilities to monitor, evaluate and learn from program activities, outputs and outcomes as well as maintaining current entries to the USAID Development Data Library

Requirements:

•Masters in GIS, Remote Sensing, Geography, Agronomy, Natural Resource Management, Hydrology, Climatology or other field relevant to this position with 10 years field experience, PhD would be preferred

•10 years of resident long-term relevant senior work expertise in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in the Sahel and West Africa

•Programming expertise in Google Earth Engine, TensorFlow, JavaScript, R, Python, HTML and SQL

•Strong and demonstrated written, presentation and verbal communication skills in English and French

•Proven record of Forming interdisciplinary cross-cultural teams, identification of opportunities, critical assessment of methodologies and technologies, and the elaboration of plans and strategies for tangible societal impact

•Development of user-driven geospatial information services such as tools, databases, models, applications or associated training

•Project management of scientific and technical teams to deliver geospatial information specific to the environmental sciences; o Leadership experience of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary teams, and some experience in distributed teams desirable

•Collaboration with scientists across the region/thematic/technical domain of the Program, including agriculture, natural resource management, environment, hydrology, meteorology and climatology

•Productive engagement with government agencies or other clients/users of geospatial information

•Productive engagement and collaboration with scientists across multiple disciplines 

•Establishing effective relations with donors and experience in coordinating projects

 Desirable experience:

•Cooperation and reporting experience with USAID or other donors and/or NASA, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations

•Software expertise for spatial analysis and data management including Google Earth Engine, GBDX, Collect Earth, Collect Earth Online, SNAP, Tethys, Geoserver, Jupyter Notebooks, QGIS, ArcGIS Pro, PowerBI

General:

This is a contractual position for a period of 36 months. 

How to apply:

Applicants should apply on or before 16 March 2023, with their latest Resume, and the names and contact information of three references that are knowledgeable about their professional qualifications and work experience. All applications will be acknowledged; however only short-listed candidates will be contacted.

ICRISAT is an equal opportunity employer.