Technical Advisor II, Sustainable Livelihoods and Landscapes

About CRS

Catholic Relief Services is the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. CRS works to save, protect, and transform lives in need in more than 100 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality. CRS’ relief and development work is accomplished through programs of emergency response, HIV, health, agriculture, education, microfinance, and peacebuilding.

Position Background:

The CRS Vision 2030 agency strategy includes the strategic goal to ensure all people achieve dignified and resilient livelihoods in flourishing landscapes. CRS’s Agricultural and Livelihoods Department (Ag/L) seeks to achieve this goal through scaling our Pathway to Prosperity approach, helping farmers to build the necessary skillset to sustainably increase productivity and strengthen business practices, and by influencing systems and structures to create an enabling environment for improving farmer livelihoods and restoring degraded lands.

The Ag/L Department is divided into several teams including Financial Education, Market System Development, Gender and Nutrition, M&E, Climate Change and Natural Resource Management, and the Transforming Livelihoods and Landscapes Strategic Change Platform (SCP3, or the “Platform” team). This position will be situated within the latter two teams that are firmly nested within one another. As part of the Climate Change and Natural Resource Management team the TAII will be supporting integration with the other Ag/L teams, particularly the Market System Development team, and will provide technical assistance for proposal design and project implementation to country programs and regions as needed. Another key element of these responsibilities are knowledge management and learning.

The land restoration Platform builds on and contributes to CRS’ broader work within agriculture and livelihoods related to natural resource management, climate change adaptation and mitigation building, but there is a need to continue to strengthen those efforts and share and apply lessons learned and best practices. As part of the Platform the TAII will contribute to the Agency’s effort of catalyzing transformational change at scale by investing in ways to break away from the project paradigm. This requires working more towards engaging local and global partners to scale people-centered land restoration models to ultimately reduce poverty and hunger and improve the lives of millions of people. A key focus of this position will be to strengthen platform activities integrating value chain and market opportunities with land restoration. Another focus area will be support to tools development and documentation of learning through briefs and report writes up targeted to both internal and external audiences. All of which will require strong writing and presentation skills.

Job Summary:

The Technical Advisor II will provide technical advice, guidance, and support to a wide range of program design and implementation issues with a focus on larger projects and scaling initiatives in the agriculture and livelihoods sector in line with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) program quality principles and standards, donor guidelines, and industry best practices to regional and Country Program (CP) teams to advance the delivery of high-quality programming to the poor and vulnerable. This position will focus on support to two broad sub-areas, (i) natural resource management and climate change adaptation and mitigation and (ii) the Transforming Landscapes and Livelihoods Strategic Change Platform. The TAII will lead both areas in understanding and creating market incentives for agriculture production and land restoration, to contribute to implementing adaptive and innovative CRS’ agriculture and livelihoods programming and scaling land restoration across the globe.