Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Advisor at Mercy Corps

Location: Potiskum, Yobe
Travel: 30%
Position Status: Full-time or Part-time, Exempt or Non-exempt, Regular or Temporary

Program / Department Summary

• Working with a diverse funding base that includes the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), UK Department for International Development (DFID), United Nations (UN), European Commission (EC), European Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (ECHO), Global Affairs Canada (FKA DFATD), and several foundations, Mercy Corps empowers people to recover from crisis, build better lives and transform their communities for good
• In 2019, Mercy Corps intends to pursue its peri-urban water and sanitation programming with an anticipated USAID funded project
• The program involves designing, rehabilitating, extending and constructing small town water and sanitation infrastructure as well as working to reform management structures to ensure that the systems are managed profitably and sustainably.

General Position Summary

• Mercy Corps is seeking candidates for a MEL Advisor who will manage and lead the MEL component
• He/she will provide strategic guidance, vision and management for successful monitoring and evaluation of the program
• H/she oversees all MEL activities, provides technical direction and support, and ensures the accurate reporting of results for program activities.
• The Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Advisor is an important position in the Mercy Corps Nigeria program responsible for contributing to strategy discussions, providing technical assistance on M&E on the program and developing successful mechanisms for learning
• The Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Advisor will be responsible for cross-cutting programmatic information management, monitoring and evaluation, ensuring that information collected is reflected upon, used to improve the program, and is incorporated into consistently high-quality reports.

Essential Job Responsibilities
Technical Leadership:

• Provide leadership, training and mentoring in the development of M&E Plans, M&E tools, survey design, methodology, data analysis, and other skills required for assessing the impact of the program.
• Lead and/or collaborate with external evaluators on the design and roll out of the program baseline and evaluations, while setting up effective systems for learning.
• Ensures programs use the necessary M&E systems and tools, to inform and improve the program, as well as feed into the broader country-level M&E system and country strategy.
• Take the lead in aligning, collecting and reporting on relevant indicators to the organizational-wide M&E systems, and other external systems as relevant.
• Support teams in collecting sex and age disaggregated data and using gender sensitive data collection methods in order to understand and respond to program results with diverse participants.
• Participates in the facilitation of country and sector-level strategic planning sessions, assisting program managers and senior management in the development of their annual plans.

Information Management:

• Works with the program and M&E teams to adopt a holistic program-level M&E system that harnesses open-source software and flexible cloud solutions to more accurately collect, monitor and verify program activities and ensure they are aligned with the country strategic and annual plan.
• Provides guidance, recommendations, and leadership to ensure that the M&E systems meet the needs of Programs Managers and Country Leadership and help address shortfalls in M&E and data management that affect program implementation.
• Contributes to program design to ensure adherence to Mercy Corps’ M&E best practices, including the use of standardized indicators, form templates, and documentation methodologies.
• Maintain a comprehensive schedule of funding reports for the program and reviews the program reports to ensure that reports contain accurate, clear, and high-quality data and presented in the proper format.
• Develop program and operational reporting templates that facilitate the acquisition, aggregation and flow of information in programs.

Capacity Building and Mentoring:

• Develops and oversees implementation of the M&E staff and partner capacity building strategy that promotes a culture of learning through systematic analysis and reflection of program data.
• Build the capacity of all relevant team members to develop and maintain an excellent M&E system, including regular reflection and analysis of program monitoring data.
• Work closely with Program Managers, Human Resources and Finance to ensure that M&E skills are incorporated into all program position descriptions and positions are budgeted for.
• Contributes to the knowledge management repository with best practices in M&E and ensure that it is accessible to all staff and partners.
• Create and sustain a work environment of mutual respect where team members strive to achieve excellence.

Internal and External Coordination:

• Active contributor and collaborator with regional and global counterparts to promote the use of M&E best practices.
• Strengthen linkages with other internal resources, including the LMS, Digital Library, Hub, and Connect, to enhance organizational learning where relevant to M&E.
• Maintain close working relationships with M&E counterparts in other relevant actors and counterparts in Nigeria.

Organizational Learning:

• As part of our commitment to organizational learning and in support of our understanding that learning organizations are more effective, efficient and relevant to the communities they serve - we expect all team members to commit 5% of their time to learning activities that benefit Mercy Corps as well as themselves.

Accountability to Beneficiaries:

• Mercy Corps team members are expected to support all efforts toward accountability, specifically to our beneficiaries and to international standards guiding international relief and development work, while actively engaging beneficiary communities as equal partners in the design, monitoring and evaluation of our field projects.

Supervisory Responsibility: MEL Team Members

• Accountability
• Reports Directly To: Deputy Chief of Party
• Works Directly With: Program Sector Managers, Program Managers, Reporting & Communications Officers, Country Director, Finance, and Operations teams. Coordinates with HQ Program Performance team and the Technical Support Unit.

Knowledge and Experience

• Bachelor's Degree in any the following or related fields: Social Science, International Development, Evaluation Research, Statistics, or Economics. Postgraduate Degree preferred.
• At least 5 years of progressively responsible experience in designing, managing and implementing results-based MEL activities, in emergency and development programming with the proven use of program technology.
• Progressively responsible experience in monitoring and evaluation of conflict mitigation, Preventing violent extremism and/or democracy and governance programs, including working with development agencies and organizations, government officials, civil society leaders, community leaders, program beneficiaries and program staff.
• Experience with theoretical and practical background in M&E and skilled in participatory qualitative and quantitative M&E methodologies and techniques.
• Excellent quantitative skills and power user with Excel; Experience with CommCare or other ODK-based mobile data collection platforms preferred; Experience with Access, and statistical packages including Stata, R or SPSS and GIS tools like QGIS, ArcGIS or Google Earth Pro is preferred.
• Experience with data management including the ability to structure and collate data sets for ease of analysis. Demonstrated understanding of intermediate statistics and ability to summarize and make predictions from multiple data sets.
• Extensive knowledge of reporting procedures, best practices, guidelines, and tools for
• Monitoring, evaluation and learning, including impact evaluation.
• Demonstrated supervisory skills, and ability to work well on a team.
• Experience in resilience measurement efforts preferred.
• Experience of working on USAID programs preferred
• Previous experience living and working in challenging or insecure environments.
• Nigeria/West Africa experience preferred.
• Fluency in spoken and written English required.
• Knowledge of local dialects is preferred.

Success Factors

• A successful candidate will have a demonstrated ability to lead and communicate effectively with team members of varied work styles and cultures, follow procedures, and meet deadlines with flexibility and creativity in planning and problem solving
• S/he will have a proven ability to learn quickly, multi-task, prioritize, take initiative, and be accountable for results, understand the larger picture while remaining focused on the details, problem solving, work within a complex and sensitive setting and to follow laws and security protocols
• The most successful Mercy Corps team members have a strong commitment to teamwork and accountability, thrive in evolving and changing environments and make effective written and verbal communication a priority in all situations.

Living Conditions / Environmental Conditions

• The position is based in Yobe, Potiskum and will require travel to field offices in and around Mercy Corps Nigeria as and when required.