Required Qualifications and Experience

• PhD in plant breeding, genetics breeding, genetics, or related field
  

Core Competencies

· At least 10 years of experience in plant breeding programs

· Evidence of significant management skills including change management and management of successful breeding teams

· Ability to work well in a diverse multicultural environment

· Excellent interpersonal and organizational skills

· Evidence of experience in resource mobilization

· Breeding Strategy: Formulating cowpea breeding strategies aimed at achieving specific goals, such as increasing yield, improving stress tolerance, or enhancing nutritional content.

· Product Design and Development: Implement an effective breeding strategy to develop elite breeding material and a product advancement process to identify new candidate varieties for targeted market segments and product profiles.

· Demand-led Breeding: Support and contribute to revision of market segment definition and target product profiles for the 4 breeding pipelines and seed system activities in the region.

· Germplasm Development: Working with NARS and selected partners, identify, obtain and develop appropriate germplasm to sustain the breeding program.

· Coordination: Coordinate the development of stage gate multilocation product performance testing strategy, data analysis and advancement process, which is aligned with target market segments, TPEs or Agro-ecologies.

Collaboration and Partnerships:

• Develop strong partnerships with national public breeding programs to collaboratively identify critical germplasm, product needs and define complementary breeding objectives.
  

• Work in partnership with scientists from other disciplines and interact with industry partners and end users (farmers, extension agents, traders, consumers, etc.) from different organizations to design well defined and clearly prioritized Target Product Profiles in the Target Population of Environments.
  

• Enable and actively support the regional crop network to collaboratively plan and implement breeding activities that optimize the development of individual and shared network germplasm products and builds capacity to share knowledge, best practices, training etc.