Main Roles and Responsibilities
Technical Leadership and Programme Quality:
- Provide technical support across all agriculture and livelihoods programming, including crop and livestock production, agribusiness and value chain development, income generation, climate-smart agriculture, and resilience-based livelihoods approaches.
- Ensure agriculture and livelihoods interventions are technically sound, contextually appropriate, climate-sensitive, and aligned with Concern’s global strategies and Afghanistan Country Strategic Plan.
- Support Programme Managers in ensuring coherence and consistency of agriculture and livelihoods approaches across projects, geographic areas, and funding streams.
- Promote integrated and multi-sectoral programming approaches, linking agriculture and livelihoods with nutrition, WASH, disaster risk reduction, and social protection where relevant.
Support to Programme Design, Implementation, and Adaptation:
- Provide technical input to needs assessments, market assessments, value chain analyses, and feasibility studies to inform programme design and adaptation.
- Support the design and development of high-quality concept notes and proposals, ensuring strong technical logic, evidence-based approaches, and clear pathways to impact.
- Provide ongoing technical support during implementation through field visits, technical reviews, and coaching of programme teams and consortium partners.
- Support adaptive management by analyzing programme data, monitoring findings, and contextual changes to improve relevance, effectiveness, and sustainability.
Capacity Strengthening and Technical Support:
- Design and lead capacity-strengthening plans for Concern staff and consortium partners, including training, mentoring, coaching, and on-the-job technical support.
- Provide technical guidance to field-level staff and partner organizations on agriculture production techniques, post-harvest handling, market engagement, business development, and livelihood diversification.
- Support partners to apply good practice in gender-responsive, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable agriculture and livelihoods programming.
- Contribute to the development and adaptation of technical guidelines, tools, and standard operating procedures relevant to agriculture and livelihoods.
Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL):
- Work closely with MEAL teams to ensure appropriate indicators, tools, and methodologies are used to measure agriculture and livelihoods outcomes and impact.
- Provide technical input into baseline studies, midline/endline evaluations, and learning reviews related to agriculture and livelihoods programming.
- Support documentation of best practices, lessons learned, and innovations, and promote their use to strengthen programme quality and organizational learning.
- Ensure accountability to programme participants by promoting participatory approaches and alignment with the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS).
Partnerships, Coordination, and Representation:
- Provide technical leadership and guidance to consortium partners implementing agriculture and livelihoods interventions, ensuring alignment with agreed strategies and standards.
- Liaise with relevant departments, NGOs and other actors to strengthen coordination, learning, and collaboration.
- Represent Concern in relevant technical working groups, cluster meetings, coordination forums, and sector platforms at national and sub-national levels.
- Contribute to advocacy and engagement efforts related to agriculture, food security, livelihoods, and resilience, based on programme evidence and learning.
Cross-Cutting Issues, Safeguarding, and Compliance:
- Ensure agriculture and livelihoods programmes integrate gender equality, protection, inclusion, and conflict sensitivity.
- Ensure all work is carried out in compliance with Concern policies and procedures, including safeguarding, P4, CHS, finance, logistics, and security management.
- Promote environmentally sustainable and climate-resilient approaches across all agriculture and livelihoods activities.
Technical Support to the Faragir Consortium:
- Responsibilities below to be delivered in coordination with the Faragir consortium manager from Afghanaid.
- Lead the development and harmonization of technical guidelines, manuals, and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for key Faragir activities, including but not limited to:
- Advanced on-farm, off-farm, and non-farm livelihood training curricula.
- Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) techniques.
- Small-scale livestock management and linkage with veterinary field units (VFUs).
- Provide technical input into the design and management models for shared infrastructure (e.g., Agricultural Service Centers, storage facilities).
- S/he will be a technical lead to the Agriculture & Livelihood working group responsible for organizing periodic working group meetings and preparing meeting reports for the Consortium members.
- Facilitate regular technical working group meetings with partner staff to share challenges, successes, and lessons learned.
- Develop a capacity-building plan for partner field staff (Agriculture Officers, Enterprise Officers, Community Mobilisers).
- Lead Training of Trainers (ToT) sessions and coordinate the delivery of technical training for master trainers and field staff across all consortium partners.
- Conduct regular field monitoring visits to assess the technical quality of implementation, provide on-the-job coaching, and troubleshoot challenges in project partner locations.
- Document and disseminate best practices, case studies, and technical lessons learned related to agriculture and livelihoods within the consortium and to external stakeholders as appropriate.
Emergency Response and Organizational Support
- Provide technical support to emergency and early recovery responses related to food security, agriculture, and livelihoods, as required.
- Contribute to emergency preparedness, contingency planning, and rapid response assessments when needed.
- Undertake other relevant duties as assigned by the supervisor/senior management.
Core Humanitarian Standards (CHS):
- The concern is committed to CHS to ensure downward accountability. CHS standards guide Concern activities in all stages both emergency and development projects /programs. In Afghanistan, we also bounded our activities by Accountability framework and therefore any Afghanistan employees is responsible to comply with CHS principles and benchmarks as instructed by its policies and therefore make sure that all accept and implement CHS standards in all our activities.
- To give full support in relation to emergencies/ humanitarian operations when occurring in any area that Concern Afghanistan will respond. This can include but is not limited to participation in the Concern Afghanistan Rapid Deployment Unit (CARDU) and deployment on emergency response teams
