Globaldev careers: The livelihoods director

Casey Harrison is director for livelihoods and agribusiness with Nuru International, a small NGO that offers locally led training and support in agriculture, household savings, health care, and education in rural areas. Currently based in Costa Rica, his day can start as early as 5 a.m. to accommodate calls with partners and collaborators in Europe and with local NGO teams in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria. As a director, he then spends a lot of time on internal strategic calls to ensure alignment and management of the organization’s compliance, operations, thought leadership, and quality assurance. What’s left of the day is dedicated to external thought leadership through webinars and panels, and keeping up with developments in the sector. On the programmatic side, he coaches the local staff managing projects on the ground and learns from their expertise to be able to translate lessons and successes to the other contexts where Nuru works. Having grown up on a farm, Harrison’s time serving with the Peace Corps in Zambia reinvigorated his passion for agriculture. After going back to school to gain a stronger academic foundation in development, he pursued his interest in conservation and worked with the World Wildlife Fund before returning to development. With most organizations, working within livelihoods and agribusiness involves looking at microeconomics, agricultural economics, agronomic production systems, and digital financial inclusion, Harrison said. Then there are tasks related to curriculum development for business training or looking at behavior change within the agricultural context. You have to be a generalist, he said, but develop some specific technical expertise based on your interests that allows you to apply your varied skills to solving new problems. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. “You have to be ready to be a generalist [while not losing] your specialist passion.” --— Casey Harrison, livelihoods and agribusiness director, Nuru International What are some of the challenges of the job and lessons you’ve learned to overcome them? Time management is a big one because of the [different] time zones and you want to be sensitive to other people's time of day but you also have to be protective of your own work-life balance. The other one [is] that there is so much to consume in terms of knowledge and information and there's so many responsibilities that are related to things like operations and M&E [or monitoring and evaluations] and compliance [so] the ability to stay ahead or to stay on pace with how things are moving [is important] but also to not try to change too much of your thinking too fast ... and staying focused on your mission and not letting scope creep become something that distracts you from what you're really trying to accomplish. The other challenge is cross-cultural [communication] … [but] as long as you're patient and you listen and you do really try to build in active listening and your own professional continuous improvement, you can find ways to communicate [with] different groups of people. What technical skills have been valuable to your career progress? Economics has been helpful and key — environmental economics as well as a better understanding of agricultural economics and microeconomics, so just that element of how value is really generated and measured. Policy analysis has been crucial — [I recommend] taking classes to force you to engage with policy in a structured way. The study of resilience has emerged in the last decade or so and has been the paramount view of the desired outcome for communities, for landscapes, for how socio-ecological resilience has evolved, so that framework has been key for me. And then production systems [and] agriculture agronomics fundamentally, both in a practical setting as well as the classrooms and labs have all been super useful. How do you see the impact of your work? Evaluative, rigorous, M&E [measured] impact is important because data-driven decision-making is vital but it's not the type of impact that builds [momentum]. For me, [the impact] has really been working with emerging young professionals in different contexts — Ethiopia, Zambia, Nigeria, Kenya — and seeing some of them ... because of their own growth, drive, and commitment, being able to apply some of these more complex theories and strategies for creating change. Within the Nuru context, this means meaningful choices for farmers, generating more income. … One of the anecdotes from some of those team members was watching households in their communities that we're serving go from grass thatch to metal sheets [as roofing for houses]. Simple, observable anecdotes such as that are the most powerful part of this work [and] just seeing material change in people's lives that don't necessarily always get teased out when you're aggregating M&E data. How have you seen your scope of work changed in the last few years? One particular area is technology and the role that technology plays in development. I've spent a ton of time over the last couple [of] years both within Nuru, as well as in the agribusiness market ecosystem alliance ... where I lead the ag-tech working group, to help better demystify technology in relation to development programming and how the two can be better integrated by building trust and collaboration opportunities … [and] having harder discussions about how to get technology to scale to more people, and then how do you build the underlying demand for technology. Another area has been looking at [doing] things on a larger scale. Instead of looking at our impact being related to our model at the household level, looking at it at the farmer business level, farmer organization levels, looking at resilience at multiple scales. What advice would you give for other professionals interested in this type of role? My love for agriculture has been a centering focus ... conservation [and] development can seem like two very opposing areas, potentially, if you haven't spent a lot of time looking at conservation development programming and its growth, which is a niche area. But agriculture is a theme that runs across both of those. So staying true to what you're passionate about ... that'll be the thing that gets you through the hard times when you're questioning your decisions. [But] the other thing is you have to be ready to be a generalist [while not losing] your specialist passion. You're going to have [some] understanding of M&E, fundraising efforts, and communication strategies. Don't ignore those skill sets because those are going to be the things that help you find ways to take your technical knowledge and apply it to create value for others in your organization [and] partners externally, and help you find your niche within the sector. [Building on that, I would reiterate the] importance of connecting our global ambitions in the development sector — and this goes for the environmental space too — with local realities. There's obviously the adage and some might say [the] played-out saying, “Think global and act local.” [But] that has to be applied within the context of development and in a way that is much more complicated than our advocacy may make it seem. [My] message would be this work is very complex, very challenging, [but] it's very motivating. [And] we still have to remember that these actions have to be taken within local communities and through locally led development. Update, May 26, 2021: This article has been updated to reflect that Harrison’s day can start as early as 5 a.m.