Senior Research Associate – Market Intelligence

The World Agroforestry Centre, is an international institute headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, and founded in 1978. The Centre specializes in the sustainable management, protection and regulation of tropical rainforest and natural reserves.

Senior Research Associate – Market Intelligence

Overview

About our organization: CIMMYT is a cutting edge, non-profit, international organization dedicated to solving tomorrow’s problems today. It is entrusted with fostering improved quantity, quality, and dependability of production systems and basic cereals such as maize, wheat, triticale, sorghum, millets, and associated crops through applied agricultural science, particularly in the Global South, through building strong partnerships. This combination enhances the livelihood trajectories and resilience of millions of resource-poor farmers, while working towards a more productive, inclusive, and resilient agrifood system within planetary boundaries. For more information, visit: cimmyt.org CIMMYT is hosted by World Agroforestry (ICRAF), a member of the CGIAR that is headquartered on United Nations Avenue, Nairobi, Kenya. We invite you to learn more about CIMMYT and World Agroforestry by accessing our web sites: www.cimmyt.org and www.worldagroforestry.org

Duties and responsibilities

• Portfolio Research Coordination and Workflow Management.

• Coordinate assigned market intelligence studies, typically managing day-to-day activities across 2–3 studies at a time, to help ensure delivery against agreed scope, quality standards, budgets and timelines.

• Maintain study workplans, trackers, milestones and deliverable schedules; identify implementation risks or delays and raise issues requiring further direction with relevant staff

• Coordinate agreed research workflows across questionnaire development, partner engagement and procurement, survey programming, piloting, field implementation and data handover

• Coordinate between the internal research teams, country teams, procurement colleagues and external research partners for assigned studies

• Support preparation of implementation plans, budgets, Terms of Reference, scopes of work and partner deliverables, based on agreed study requirements

• Maintain organized study documentation and ensure key decisions, changes and implementation updates are recorded and communicated to relevant team members.

• Research Design, Survey Review and Standardization.

• Contribute to the design and implementation of quantitative, qualitative and experimental market research studies, selecting and adapting research tools appropriate to different research questions and respondent groups

• Guide the development and implementation of research approaches including surveys, interviews, focus groups, observational approaches, concept or product testing, experiments and other appropriate market research methods

• Explore, test and refine new research methods and tools that could strengthen market intelligence research, including appropriate applications of AI-assisted research tools, digital methods, video-based approaches and other emerging techniques

• Review and standardize questionnaire content across assigned studies, including question wording, response categories, variable naming, coding, identifiers and use of agreed templates, question banks and data dictionaries

• Check survey instruments for logic, consistency, respondent burden and suitability for analysis, while maintaining version control and documenting changes through review, translation, programming, piloting and field  implementation. · Contribute to the use and improvement of research protocols, SOPs and quality-assurance procedures based on lessons from study implementation

• Survey Programming, Testing and Data Quality Assurance.

• Test programmed surveys prior to deployment, document identified issues and make agreed corrections in consultation with the research team.

• Support user acceptance testing and piloting of digital survey tools, incorporating feedback and ensuring final versions are ready for field implementation.

• Apply agreed survey-programming conventions and templates to promote consistency and reusability across assigned studies.

• Support the preparation and use of routine field-monitoring and data-quality checks to identify missing data, outliers, inconsistencies, unusual interview patterns and other potential quality concerns.

• Review data-quality outputs during field implementation and flag emerging issues to the research lead and relevant research partners.