Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Officer at Palladium Group

Project Overview and Role

• The Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Support Officer reports to the Head of MEL and will be responsible for delivering ECPs MEL system to the state or federal teams assigned to them.
• They will work closely and coordinate their work with other MEL Officers and ensure good working relationships with the Technical Support Team, as well as collaborative work with relevant members of the other Pillars of PERL.
• The MEL Support Officer will support the development and management of the ECP/PERL MEL system, including contributing to the development and operationalisation of the programmes Learning and Adaptive Management Platform, developing and implementing a MEL plan and ensuring integration of these with the programmes knowledge management and communications system.

Relationships
Teamwork & Mentoring:

• The MEL Officer should familiarize themselves with the ToRs of all their team members as well as key programme management frameworks: technical, financial and administrative policies and guidelines.
• Actively contribute to Team-Building within the ECP/PERL team, use of shared mission, vision, values, identity/public profile, use of staff meetings, staff welfare, social events, formal and informal opportunities, etc, to reinforce teamwork.
• Actively contribute to a positive office culture within the joint PERL office in Abuja, and collaborate with other programmes to ensure operational synergies.
• Mentor other colleagues, partners and contractors (within and outside of ECP, and across states) ? direct provision of guidance and support, consistent with ECPs vision, mission and values/principles.
• Look out for, highlight and support resolution of internal challenges impacting on team performance.
• Building relationships with key programme partners
• Establish a good working relationship with other ECP MEL Officers. Work as a team under the technical guidance and supervision of the Head of MEL as your line manager.
• Establish a good working relationship with selected State/Federal Teams (up to 3, as required), and keep the State/Federal Team Leader informed of planned support to their state team and provide feedback. Liaise directly with all members of staff in the state on their use of ECP information management systems.
• Liaise directly with State/Federal Team Leaders, Partnership Facilitators to carry out your principle duties on MEL

Responsibilities
Development of MEL Support Strategy, Processes and Systems:

• Actively work to familiarise him/herself with PERLs and ECPs MEL architecture, including its theory of change, results framework, Learning and Adaptive Management Platform, MEL Plan and performance assessment tools
• Contribute to the development of the above as directed by the Head of MEL
• Collect feedback on the above systems and contribute to on-going refinements of them especially from the MEL Reporting Officer, MEL Data Analyst and the whole Technical Support Team.
• Contribute to the development of communications, information management and reporting systems drawing on MEL information, including MEL data analysis and feedback to state teams.
• Support state teams to develop location specific MEL processes and systems in line with the national strategy, processes and systems.

Management of MEL Support Systems:

• Identify and liaise with providers of ICT services/solutions for information management (i.e. VPN/cloud, intranet/extranet, internet, dropbox, MS Office suite, etc.). Provide technical guidance and quality assurance of all related procurement and contracting.
• Engage with other Pillars ICT managers and specialists to maximise technical compatibility to enable accessibility across the PERL programme.
• Contribute to the development of ECPs information management systems for MEL (i.e. Learning and Adaptive Management Platforms (LAMPs), but also ECPs email systems, electronic and hard-copy filing and retrieval systems, intranet/extranet and other ICT solutions appropriate to ECPs needs) in the context of ECPs overall MEL, reporting and results communications frameworks and in line with ECPs overall technical approach/philosophy.
• Support the MEL Reporting Officer to manage and maintain the reporting systems derived from ECP?s information management systems for MEL.
• Consult with ECP teams (assigned states and federal), and MEL Reporting Officer to ensure systems developed are user-friendly and appropriate to ECP staff capacity at each level.

Delivery of MEL Support to Federal & State Teams:

• Support state/federal teams in understanding and applying partner assessment tools under the direction of the Head of MEL and quality assure outputs
• Support state/federal teams in developing and implementing geographic and workstream specific M&E plans and quality assure outputs
• Support state/federal teams in using activity, quarterly and annual reporting templates and quality assure outputs
• Support the Head of MEL in building the capacity of state and federal teams to analyse and assess the monitoring, evaluation and learning practices, needs and potentials of local partners. Support state teams to develop guidelines, templates, pro-forma, performance matrices, etc, to strengthen partners? own monitoring, evaluation and learning and quality assure outputs.
• Habitually monitor and promote value for money analysis and diminishing financial dependency of partners on ECP

Delivery of IT Support to National, Federal Teams & other Assigned Teams:

• Conduct regular audit and address immediate problems relating to individual staffs use of ECP e-mail: accounts, addresses, outlook set-up, etc. in selected states/offices.
• Conduct regular audit and address immediate problems relating to staffs use of ECP-PERLBoX account, electronic filing-trees, databases, office servers: routine backing-up of key folders and files, naming and storage of documents, data storage, etc. in selected states/offices.
• Advise on and liaise with contracted location/State IT Support to address any immediate IT problems (computer & network malfunctions) negatively impacting on information management in selected states/offices.
• Advise on and liaise with contracted National IT Support (through the Head of MEL Support) to address any IT problems (computer & network malfunctions) that cannot be resolved at state level.

Compliance
Other reasonable tasks/amendments to TOR.:

• Agree that performance will be assessed based on these Terms of References. Any amendments to these ToRs should be discussed and agreed with your line manager.
• Understand that you will be expected to undertake any reasonable task as requested by their line manager where it is not disruptive to other duties or inappropriate for the level of this position.

Information Management:

• Ensure familiarity with all DFID and Palladium Policies and procedures and check SharePoint regularly to ensure that any updates are also being implemented in a timely manner.
• Ensure that all work is completed in an accountable and transparent manner, this includes the use of official emails for work purposes, and use of personal emails will not be permitted. All work must be saved to the agreed cloud or central server storage systems and not individual desktops or hard-drives.

Requirements

• Educated to a University Degree level or above
• At least 6 years experience in working on Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning roles on programmes
• Experience working in a donor (preferably DFID) funded programme

Key Competencies and Professional Expertise Required:

• Strong expertise in developing and implementing programmatic M&E tools, including logframes, M&E Plans and information management systems
• Expertise in providing technical support and capacity building to complex teams, in particular mentoring based approaches
• Ability to work as part of a complex team and maintain remote relationships
• Understanding of state and civil society dynamics in Nigeria