Land Economist Sought: Strengthening Advisory Capacities for Land Governance in Africa

Addressing land policy is critical for a world without hunger, for climate resilience and sustainable urbanization. Policy-makers’ awareness of the importance of land governance has grown over the last years. Key milestones include the African Land Policy Initiative (LPI), established by the African Union Commission (AUC), the United Nations Commission for Africa (UNECA)and the African Development Bank (AfDB), that led to the 2009 adoption of a Framework and Guidelines on Land Policy in Africa (F&G) by African Heads of State and the FAO-led process culminating in the 2012 agreement on ‘Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security’ (VGGT) by the Committee for World Food Security (CFS).

To help Africa translate this policy consensus into strengthening land governance on the ground, the German Government - through its special initiative ‘One World-No Hunger’ – has established the program “Strengthening capacities for Land Governance in Africa (SLGA)”. BMZ has tasked GIZ with implementation of the SLGA in partnership with LPI and the World Bank, which is a unique partnership for achieving change combining a policy mandate at highest level, with top research capacity and a network of excellence on Land Governance for building educational and advisory capacities in Africa. SLGA builds on a long history of engagement by each of the founding partners (LPI, GIZ, World Bank) and is catalytic in complementing each of the partners' specific activities and strengths.

The World Bank has a long-standing engagement on land through research, policy dialogue, and projects at the global level and in Africa. The research of the Development Research Department (DECRG) at the World Bank has long been instrumental in documenting the benefits from land administration on agricultural productivity, environmental sustainability, land markets, household income, and women’s empowerment. 

In the SLGA, the World Bank will coordinate the action area on analytical capacity strengthening that will assist African institutions to generate the data (survey, administrative, spatial) needed to monitor land governance, build analytical capacity to use them in an integrated manner to generate rigorous evidence on the socio-economic impact of scalable low-cost interventions to improve land governance, as well as capacity to use the result for country strategies and in design of innovations. In doing so, the activities under this action areaaim to enable countries integrate improvements in land governance into their overall development strategies, mobilize funding for efforts to do so, and regularly measure progress towards achieving these in a participatory way.

To fully harness the synergies of the SLGA partnership, GIZ in close collaboration with the World Bank is recruting a fulltime economist to (i) provide training to African institutes in data collection and analysis, (ii) support analytical capacity building of the technical nodes in SLGA and (iii) disseminate the results.

Your tasks

Specific responsibilities include:

Curriculum development and training in land data collection, analysis and translation into policy design (40%):

• Development of training material and provide training on household survey design & analysis; impact evaluation and spatial data analysis (e.g. developing curricula on all aspects of land tenure data collection and impact evaluation).
• Development of training materials on techniques for land governance monitoring, real-time evaluation of pilots, projects and programs, and integration of research findings into policy design.
• Preparation of course material and design and delivery of courses on key emerging aspects of land governance; develop online courses; teach short courses at African universities.
• Integration of capacity development in existing capacity building events and leveraging research networks.
• Support research institutes and networks with design, implementation and analysis of  household surveys (or survey modules) on land; acquisition and analysis of spatial data; collection and analysis of administrative data (20%).
• Maintain and expands links to technical nodes on the relevance of such data for their work and generate new research hypotheses (20%).
• Conduct outreach to policy makers in Africa and the communities and networks of researchers in Africa and Germany (e.g. put data and analysis up on the web and link to existing sources); networking between of research institutes, universities and think tanks on land policy research (20%).

Your profile

• Degree or advance degree in economics, statistics or related field. 
• Strong analytical skills and experience pertaining to survey methodology and analysis; and spatial data analysis.
• Demonstrated research and analytical skills and experience pertaining to microdata and use for policy analysis.
• Experience with data management and analysis and advanced knowledge of STATA.
• Experience in all aspects of household survey implementation (questionnaire design, sampling, enumerator training, data collection) and analysis.
• Ability to translate research findings into policy recommendations and support for operational work.
• Demonstrated experience with developing training materials and organizing capacity building.
• Well-developed interpersonal and team working skills; ability to operate effectively in teams; initiative, persistence and positive attitude.
• Ability to deal sensitively in multicultural and politically sensitive environments and build effective working relations with local and international partners.
• Excellent oral and written communication and presentation skills in English.  Fluency in either of the three following languages are an advantage: German, French or Portuguese.

Assignment period

01.06.2016 - 31.05.2018

Our offer

We create prospects for people and with people. As GIZ has an international mandate, we offer a multicultural working environment. We are committed service providers and dedicated professionals, even under difficult circumstances. We take pride in enabling our employees to develop their professional and personal skills. There are plenty of reasons to join our motivated team – ranging from the diverse challenges you will face on a daily basis in one of our 130 partner countries, to the broad scope you will have for shaping your work.

Other information

This position will be anchored in the Development Research Department (DECRG) at the World Bank in Washington. Duty station will be the World Bank Country Office for Ethiopia in Addis Ababa.

The position requires frequent and extensive travel within Africa, but also between Africa and the U.S. (Washington).

Please note that we basically can only receive and process applications sent via our e-recruiting system. Should you not be able to do so, please contact the person named in the job advertisement.



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GIZ would like to improve its disability inclusion ratio at the workplace and therefore welcomes applications from people with disabilities.

If we caught your interest, we are looking forward to your application until 17.04.2016.

Contact department:

Sonja Nilsen

+49 6196 79-3332