Cowpea Breeding Lead at International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA)

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) is a not-for-profit institution that generates agricultural innovations to meet Africa’s most pressing challenges of hunger, malnutrition, poverty, and natural resource degradation. Working with various partners across sub-Saharan Africa, we improve livelihoods, enhance food and nutrition security, increase employment, and preserve natural resource integrity. IITA is a member of CGIAR, a global agriculture research partnership for a food secure future.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Cowpea Breeding Lead

Ref No: DDG-R4D/CBL/02/26
Location: Kano

Description

• The Cowpea Breeding Lead will lead, coordinate and oversee breeding activities majorly in West Africa to ensure alignment with IIITA strategy and operational plans.
• More importantly, the role entails the development and delivery of highly productive, climate-resilient, and nutritionally enhanced farmer and market preferred cowpea varieties.
• Additionally, the role includes setting breeding priorities with stakeholders, improving populations, advancing varieties through multi-stage testing, supporting variety release and breeder seed production, and contributing to regional breeding networks, modernization efforts, and resource mobilization aligned with the new Gates Foundation project (Breakthrough Cowpea Products for the West African Drylands) and CGIAR Breeding for Tomorrow (B4T).

Position Responsibilities  

• 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.
• Optimization of Breeding Processes and Operations: Ensure cost effective breeding operations, and standard operating procedures that deliver agreed quality and performance indicators.
• Enterprise Breeding Systems (EBS) and Breeding Analytics: Use EBS for management of pedigree, nurseries, yield and disease trials, experimental data and seed inventory along with Bioflow to analyze the raw data.
• Capacity Building: Provide training and mentorship to breeding staff, partners and scholars on breeding techniques, methodologies, data analysis and scientific communication.
• Resource Mobilisation: Contribute to or lead the development of research proposals and other fundraising activities.
• Publication: Lead or contribute to publication of research results in international, peer reviewed journals (Thompson-indexed journals with impact factor).
• Reporting: Develop and deliver high-quality monthly and annual reports that track progress, analyze outcomes, and document achievements against set targets.

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.

Requirements
Educational Qualifications and Experience:

• PhD in Plant Breeding, Genetics Breeding, Genetics, or related fields.

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
• Excellent written and oral communication skills
• Ability to build consensus/function as part of a team
• Problem solving and decision-making skills
• Resilience under pressure; sound risk judgment  
• Experience of managing staff and budgets.

Application Closing Date
28th February, 2026.