Deadline: April 12, 2023
Applications are open for the Gender Responsive Agriculture Systems Policy (GRASP) Fellowship 2023. The GRASP Fellowship is a career development programme that targets mid-career African women in the policy field to catalyze the design and implementation of gender-responsive agricultural policies across Africa.
An initiative of African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD) funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the GRASP Fellowship is fostering policy change across institutions and national governance systems for women’s empowerment. Through the GRASP Fellowship, AWARD seeks to grow a pool of confident and capable African women to lead policy changes to improve African smallholders’ livelihoods.
The GRASP Fellowship will offer targeted leadership and mentoring training, catalytic funding, and access to networks to enable beneficiaries to lead policy-making processes for agricultural transformation in Africa. The non-residential Fellowship includes virtual and in-person activities spread over two years for each cohort.
Fellowship Structure and Implementation
- Immersive Training Courses: The GRASP Fellowship will support selected AWARD Policy Fellows for a two-year nonresidential program that will involve intensive customized virtual and face-to-face mentoring and training programs. The training will tackle how the policy professionals can become adept at being effective negotiators, sharpen their skills to design gender-responsive policies, and build collaborative relationships with different stakeholders for desired policy outcomes.
- Three-tier mentoring programme: The GRASP Fellowship will entail a three-tiered mentoring process where mentors and mentees, at different stages in their careers, develop mutually beneficial and supportive relationships around their professional and personal capacities. Each Fellow will be matched with a mentor who will be a senior policy professional and a mentee who will be a junior policy professional. The mentoring trio will be supported to participate in structured mentoring programs to foster knowledge sharing and experience.
- Policy Innovation Projects: The AWARD Policy Fellows, their Mentors, and Fellows’ Mentees will be supported to form coalitions to work on Policy Innovation Projects (PIPs). The PIPs are the GRASP flagship interventions that will provide hands-on practical experience in collaborating toward gender-responsive policy development in the agricultural sector. Each AWARD Policy Fellow will receive modest catalytic funding to design and deploy gender-responsive PIPs to support an inclusive policy-making approach within the African agricultural context.
Eligibility
- The Fellowship targets participants from Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda.
- Applicants must have at least a master’s degree and 10 years of experience in gender, agriculture, and food systems, working on policy issues at national, regional, or continental levels.
- Applicants must be affiliated with either government organizations, non-government, private sector, development, civil society, regional and sub-regional communities, or academia.
Selection Criteria
The Fellowship targets women policy practitioners who can meet a range of criteria. The ideal AWARD Policy Fellows will:
- Explain the top policy challenges or questions they are working on.
- Show how they have played a leadership role in policy development and implementation, particularly in projects at the nexus of agricultural development, food systems, and gender equality.
- Clearly articulate what policy idea they will work on under the policy innovation projects.
Application
The application period for the Gender Responsive Agriculture Systems Policy (GRASP) Fellowship will close on April 12, 2023, 23:59 East Africa Time (GMT+3). Late submissions will NOT be accepted.
For more information, see FAQ and visit GRASP Fellowship.
