Job Vacancy - International Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) Implementation and Results Measurement Specialist (Short Term, up to 76 days)

International Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) Implementation and Results Measurement Specialist

Short Term (up to 76 days)

Background to the Program.

The Government of Indonesia partners with the Government of Australia on an initiative to boost smallholder farmers’ incomes: The Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Rural Economic Development (AIP-Rural).

AIP-Rural is a suite of programs that improves smallholder farmers’ access to new markets, better inputs, knowhow, technology, irrigation, and small loans. Its goal is to achieve a sustainable 30% increase in the net incomes of 1,000,000 male and female smallholder farmers in Eastern Indonesia by 2022. AIP-Rural operates in East Java, West and East of Nusa Tenggara, Papua and West Papua.

The program focuses on agricultural sectors that display strong growth potential and are the main source of income for many smallholder farmers. All of this is done via co-investing in new business models with local, regional, national and international market players to create business models that improve the agriculture sector’s competitiveness, especially for smallholder farmers.

AIP-Rural’s four programs are:

Promoting Rural Income through Support for Markets in Agriculture (PRISMA)

A program dedicated to supporting the Government of Indonesia’s mid-term development strategy to eradicate rural poverty. The program aims to improve agriculture competitiveness – productivity, profit, access to new or better markets, and innovation – for rural farmers. PRISMA aims to achieve a 30% increase in the net incomes of 300,000 male and female smallholder farmers in Eastern Indonesia by the program’s completion.

Tertiary Irrigation Technical Assistance (TIRTA)

TIRTA is a program that aims to improve smallholder farmers’ access to irrigation. It supports the creation of tertiary irrigation schemes that are managed by HIPPA (water user associations) and local investors (lead farmers or local entrepreneurs). The program’s goal is to increase the net income of 10,000 farmers by 60% through improvements to the efficiency, technical and economic viability of at least 35 tertiary irrigation projects.

Strengthening Agriculture Finance in Rural Areas (SAFIRA)

This is a program that improves smallholder farmers’ access to essential financial services, such as business and investment capital loans. The program facilitates a financial service model that can answer to farmers’ specific needs through a partnership between formal and informal financial institutions in rural areas. The program will also expand smallholder farmers’ financial access through key market stakeholders (including but not limited to input retailers, collectors, traders and manufacturing companies) in the value chain, with the goal of improving the net incomes of 12,000 smallholder farmers.

Applied Research and Innovation System in Agriculture (ARISA)

ARISA is a partnership between Indonesia’s Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT) and Australia’s science and technology think tank, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), that aims to disseminate applied and adaptive research in agriculture that will have practical and significant impacts on the incomes of farmers. Its goal is to support innovations that can increase the incomes of 10,000 small farmers in Eastern Indonesia by the end of 2018.

Background to the Assignment.

Both the Indonesian and Australian Governments recognise that past and current discriminatory practices have led to widespread gender inequality. Both Governments are signatories to the Convention of Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and have made policy commitments and developed programs aimed at promoting gender equality. The Australian Government’s gender and development policy aims to promote equal opportunities for women and men as participants and beneficiaries of development. Key objectives include improving women’s access to economic resources and promoting women’s participation and leadership in decision making at all levels, recognising that providing equal rights and access to resources and opportunities to women is crucial to the goal of reducing poverty.

In line with this, AIP-Rural also recognises that women play vital and central roles in sectors the programs operate in, and yet they often face even greater structural and social barriers than men, and are less well catered to by these industries. This not only limits women’s immediate access to opportunities and resources, and thus their incomes, it also limits sector growth itself, right alongside the role this sector growth can play in fostering broader social inclusion changes for women.

Furthermore, these ‘female constraints’ are often key market gaps or inefficiencies, and present a great deal of business opportunity for the private sector, from the perspective of increased revenue, customer base, market positioning, brand reputation, and many other areas. For example: partners often have a limited understanding of women as consumers or producers, despite the fact that they are often key clients; partners fail to recognise that it is very often women, rather than men, that are performing critical functions in the supply chain, and miss opportunities for performance improvements when they fail to engage them directly in embedded information provision; partners fail to enter into business-like relationships with women as key household transaction points, thus misunderstanding how decisions on risk are determined in the household, how these play into the types of products and services these households choose to engage with, and thus misunderstand how to design and price products appropriately; and so on. Recognising and seeking out this ‘dual benefit’ perspective (i.e. WEE is good for business and makes commercial sense) is the only truly effective route in this context, as it leads to far greater sustainability in the long run. 

Yet while these opportunities are potentially highly lucrative and beneficial for all, the business benefit is not always immediately obvious and/or intuitive, and the risk is that when the benefit is not clearly understood by business, too often the take-away of WEE intervention negotiations for partners is the initial transaction cost (e.g. the initial costs associated with developing women’s skills). Intervention designers need to be smart in helping translate the benefits of such training costs into commercial wins (e.g. ‘if you train the women in your supply chain on post-harvest practices, we estimate your post-harvest losses could drop by around 15%, so this initial investment is small against the long-term gains’). Working with women might also involve several preconceptions (about the capability or social acceptability of working with women, etc.), so intervention designers need to be well-aware of the complex trust and confidence building steps needed to broker these deals (e.g. sometimes piloting is needed to overcome initial rooted preconceptions and lower inherent internal biases).

Organisationally, within market systems programs, to reach a level where teams can develop suitable, tailored, market driven and sustainable measures to transform WEE challenges into business opportunities, the following ‘essential ingredients’/key steps are needed, and in relation to the AIP-Rural has made the following progress.

Objective of  the Assignment.

With the background presented above in mind, AIP-Rural now seeks an International Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) Implementation and Results Measurement specialist to support the program in undertaking the following tasks:

• The overarching objective of the assignment is to strengthen the program’s deal making and results measurement at the implementation level to enable better identification of opportunities, strong WEE design, pitching and negotiations, through to strong identification of appropriate WEE results measurement strategies to further improve the initial business case and ultimate impact.
• The key focus of this assignment is thus less of formal strategic reviewer and far more of capacity builder working closely alongside teams to strengthen their work in situ. 
• The sub-objectives of the assignment are thus to:
  

• work closely alongside the implementation teams, build their capacity in developing a stronger, practical-based approach to WEE deal making, and to codify this into best practice within the Gender - and broader program Deal Making - Guidelines;
• review the current and pipeline portfolio of interventions and identify priority/strategic areas of WEE focus for sub-sector teams;
• work closely with the Results Measurement team and management to a.) develop smart WEE aggregate level indicators to track overall progress trends at the program portfolio levels (avoiding target setting that perversely incentivises and thus impedes true progress), and b.) work closely with the Results Measurement team and with implementation teams to select effective WEE indicators at the intervention level, keeping in mind the need for a lean and targeted approach given the breadth of information that must be collected for these interventions. This will also specifically look at developing and systematically documenting the evidence for business cases. 
  

These tasks as outlined further below under ‘Phasing, Deliverables, and Tentative Schedule’. Specific activity schedules will be developed by the program in close corporation with the Specialist in advance on each visit.

Key Selection Criteria

Essential skills and experience:

1. Academic background in Social Sciences or other relevant degree(s);
2. Strong conceptual foundation in M4P, private sector development and practical experience in its application in different contexts;
3. Expertise in embedding gender and/or Women’s Economic Empowerment within market development programs at the implementation level (i.e. practical experience working on partnership brokering around gender and WEE);
4. Experience with embedding Women’s Economic Empowerment measurement approaches within DCED measurement frameworks/systems;
5. More than 10 years of professional experience in international development with a focus on market systems, including gender inclusion;
6. Proven strong written and verbal communication skills in English;
7. Proven experience in staff mentoring and coaching.
8. Strong writing and communication skills.

Desirable skills and experience:

1. Experience on projects funded by DFAT;
2. Some skills in spoken Bahasa Indonesia.
   

Functional Relationships

This position:

• Reports to the AIP-Rural Deputy General Manager.
• Coordinates closely with the AIP-Rural Program Operations Manager who will provide guidance and coordinate the Specialist’s input

Click this link to apply the position . Closing date of is 22  August 2017