Vacancy at HDCS

Research Officer

(agriculture, entrepreneurship & marketing)

Organisation Background:

Human Development and Community Services (HDCS) is a faith-based NGO working in three main sectors of health, education, and community development since 1991. Currently, it manages various projects across Nepal especially in rural regions and provides services through hospitals, health camps, public health programs, disaster preparedness and response, school development programs, teacher training, educational daycare centres for special needs children, and community radio stations. HDCS is committed to attracting and retaining the best employees from all ethnicities, gender and backgrounds in our vision to transform the communities.

Responsibilities:

The Research Officer will be involved in community development projects, with main focus in West Rukum. The projects cover a wide range of areas including livelihood, community-based jobs, (organic) agriculture, livestock husbandry, entrepreneurship, market and marketing of organic products.

The Research Officer will collaborate with team members from different projects to strengthen the overall livelihood opportunities and enlarge the market for farmers and entrepreneurs in HDCS project areas, mainly West Rukum. The goal is to produce research insights that will directly translate into new or adapted project activities.

Responsibilities will include: making research plan with clearly defined milestones, performing topic-related research, developing functional tools for ongoing data collection and reporting, setting up system for ongoing data collection, performing ongoing data analysis and visualization, setting up platform for ongoing updates and reports.

The Research Officer will work in close cooperation with the MEAL Coordinator and the central office team including Project Manager, Partnership Coordinator, etc.

Conditions:

This is a full-time position with 40 working hours per week.

The employment contract is a 1-year contract with possible extension on project base.

The working location is based in Kathmandu with frequent and prolonged research stays in project area, mainly in West Rukum.

Qualifications:

Degree

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent from diverse fields such as Agriculture, Economics, Social Science, Media/Marketing, Data Science/IT/Programming, etc
• Persons who shifted their professional focus through non-academic advanced trainings in entrepreneurship, marketing or data science are highly welcome to apply.

Key skills and expertise

• Highly autonomous working style and capacity to develop own research and activity framework
• Strong analytical problem-solving mindset and creativity to develop own solutions where there is no pre-determined way
• Friendly and open attitude to collaborate with HDCS team members as well as external stakeholders
• Experience in data collection, administering surveys and conducting interviews, data cleaning and analysis, data visualization and reporting
• Learning attitude and willingness to explore new skills and tools
• Strong verbal and written communication skills in English and Nepali

Additional beneficial skills and expertise

• Additional: Experience in design thinking and entrepreneurship to transform key research findings into viable solutions is of advantage
• Additional: Experience in small scale business strategy, value chain analysis, market and supply chain analysis is of advantage
• Additional: Basic knowledge in graphic design and campaigning is of advantage (such as Adobe, Canva, Sketch, etc)
• Additional: Basic knowledge in website hosting, social media management and metric analytics, SEO and SEM is of advantage (such as Google analytics, WordPress, Contently, etc)
• Additional: Basic knowledge of data analysis software or programming language for data analysis is of advantage (such as SPSS, STATA, R, Python, C++, SQL, Java) as well as proficiency in geospatial information system software is an advantage (such as Strater, ArcGIS, Surfer, Geosoft Target, etc)