- Location:
- Washington, D.C., DC
- Sector:
- Commercial
- Organization URL:
- http://www.fintrac.com
- Experience:
- Mid Career
- Date Posted
- Aug-19-2011
Description
USAID's Enabling Agricultural Trade (EAT) project supports U.S. Government (USG) efforts to foster a more enabling environment for agricultural growth. USAID established EAT based on substantial academic and field experience suggesting that a sound legal, regulatory, and institutional environment is a pre-requisite to economic growth in the agricultural sector. EAT offers a suite of targeted and customizable tools to identify, diagnose, and reform the agricultural enabling environment constraints that hinder agribusinesses' start-up and growth.
EAT is developing a cross-country tool to measure and monitor the agribusiness enabling environment. The index will quantify the numbers of procedures, amount of time and associated transaction costs faced by agribusinesses, and in some cases will go beyond the issue of regulatory burden, tackling more qualitative issues such as the strength of legal rights, or the degree of competition in a given sector. A solid draft set of benchmarks and case studies have been developed. These will be now be refined, adapted into a survey tool and related materials, and piloted.
The resulting tool is intended to encourage governments to prioritize reform in the agribusiness enabling environment. It will also enable the development community to test the hypothesis that rural agriculture-based business really is different from urban business, and that those differences require different policy reforms and government services. Initially, the tool is expected to be used for intra-regional comparisons, and is expected to be useful to USAID programmatic staff as part of the Feed the Future Initiative. Over time the hope is to move to a low-cost and scaled global index, which would allow an additional use of tracking progress of reforms in one particular economy over time.
Job Description:
EAT seeks a consultant with 5-10 years relevant experience to lead the refinement and pilot of this new methodology. The consultancy will be based in Washington, DC, with short periods of time in the field (countries TBD) during the pilot phase. Successful candidates will demonstrate solid, general knowledge of and professional exposure to the following subject areas:
- Business enabling environment (BEE) concepts, such as enforcement of contracts, licensing regimes, financial sector governance, trade policy and facilitation, labor and land policies and institutions, credit and land registries, tax compliance, fiscal policy and implementing institutions, investment promotion and protection, business registration, and bankruptcy law. Specialized knowledge in one or more of these areas is preferred.
- Agriculture and Agribusiness development issues, such as value chain analysis and development; agricultural or livestock production, processing, storage, and transport; agricultural finance; agro-industrial development; international food and agricultural investment; and global and regional market analysis. Specialized knowledge in one or more of these areas is preferred.
- Related tools and indices, such as the World Bank's Doing Business Survey, the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index, the World Bank's Investment Climate Surveys (ICS) and Assessments (ICA), the UNCTAD Foreign Direct Investment Potential Index, and Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index.
Qualifications
The consultancy will demand expertise in the following functional areas:
- Survey design
- Data collection and management
- Approaches to benchmarking and indexing, particularly in the area of international governance and policy
- Workshop facilitation
- Structured and semi-structured interviewing, particularly in a developing country context.
- Budget formulation and management
- Leading small, mixed teams of experts in the field
Contact Details
- Contact:
- Walter Josephs
- Telephone:
- 202-462-8475
- Email:
- walter@fintrac.com
Application Instructions
EATrecruitment@fintrac.com
