Policy & State Capability Officer – Nigeria

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) seeks a Policy & State Capability Officer for its Abuja, Nigeria location. This role involves supporting agricultural transformation by empowering smallholder farmers through improved seed access, sustainable farming practices, and market linkages. The position emphasizes collaboration, excellence, and innovation within a diverse team dedicated to enhancing food security and farmer livelihoods across Africa.
Policy & State Capability Officer – Nigeria


Location: Abuja.


AGRA and its Work to Transform Agriculture


AGRA is an African-led institution that actively supports the drive towards inclusive agricultural transformation and sustainable food systems. We do this by empowering the continent’s 33 million smallholder farming households to transform their agriculture from a struggle to survive to profitable businesses. The continent’s farmers regularly face challenges, and we aspire to provide uniquely African solutions that respond to their agricultural and environmental challenges, leading to increased harvests for reduced hunger and more income.


Working in alignment with the development priorities of our focus countries, we enable farmers to access improved and high-yielding seeds, gain knowledge on sustainable farming, and linkages to profitable markets.


In our work, we aspire to build the alliances, partnerships, and networks required to drive an inclusive agricultural transformation. We work with our partners to create an equitable youth-friendly environment that harnesses the youth dividend on the continent to drive growth and facilitate open employment opportunities for young women and men. We achieve our key objectives through a focus on the following four areas of intervention:



Policy and state capability – We support governments in creating an enabling environment for private sector involvement in agricultural transformation.
Seed systems – We trigger higher productivity by increasing the availability and access to improved seeds by farmers allowing them to increase their harvests for food security and better incomes.
Sustainable farming – We support farmers in building resilient farming systems for sustained high yields through interventions such as mechanization and irrigation.
Inclusive markets and trade – We work to increase the linkages between farmers, and other market actors for a positive, sustained cycle of commercialization and reinvestment.

Why Join Us?
People are the heartbeat of our organization and remain the true drivers of our delivery, impact, and success.
We have cultivated a workplace that fuels Depth in Collaboration, Excellence in Execution, Constructive Engagements, and a spirit of being Increasingly Entrepreneurial; all underpinned by our cherished I-RISE Values (Integrity, Respect, Innovation, Stewardship and Equity)


We work with incredible people and partners who have roots in farming communities across the African continent combined with an inclusive, diverse, and talented workforce from over 25 nationalities. Our commitment to a call to action goes beyond ourselves as we arise to catalyze African Food Systems transformation and improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers.


We are looking for people who are passionate about being part of a mission-driven team that is making a real difference on the continent; love to work on cutting edge Ag technologies; and able to grow their skills, expertise, and experience career growth, while enjoying very competitive compensation and benefits.


Are you ready to embark on this exciting transformative journey with us?


The Position
Policy & State Capability Officer – Nigeria The Policy & State Capability (PSC) Officer will be responsible for driving AGRA’s government and public sector engagement efforts to ensure the successful implementation of the AGRA’s Integrated Government Program in the country. This program involves all government related work across all AGRA’s business lines, and across all our four routes to impact: primary value chains for end-to-end development, secondary value chains, national ecosystem strengthening and coordination and delivery of the country’s CAADP 3.0 aligned with National Agrifood Systems Investment Plan (NAIP).
The role involves ensuring ‘political economy-smart’ programming and involves building the capacities of governments and its related agencies to deliver their mandates. The role includes supporting governments on quality sector visioning/ strategies and facilitate implementation of key policies and flagship initiatives. This should be done in a way that strengthens the government’s institutional capacity and supporting the government to align and mobilise development partners around its priority agri-food agenda, and with AGRA’s work in-country.


It also requires fostering healthy coordination and mutual accountability between the government, private sector actors (including anchor firms and farmers) and non-state actors around the priority agenda. Hence the role must work very closely with all other programmatic officers in other business lines in the country team.


S/He should be able to work excellently with government a