Country Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Manager - Nigeria at Mercy Corps

The Country MEL Manager oversees MEL unit in Nigeria. The role of the MEL unit is to strengthen the effectiveness and quality of its portfolio programs and projects by providing technical and advisory support to Program/Project teams on all aspects of Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) and Knowledge Management. This includes strengthening portfolio and program/project MEL systems, practices, and processes to enhance capacity for program teams to become more effective around implementing MEL activities to maximize interventions impact; and leverage learning and insights within implementation teams, with partners and communities to ensure accountability. As a key member of the Program Performance and Quality (PaQ) team in Mercy Corps Nigeria, the Country Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Manager will be responsible for:

• Participate in the roll out and monitoring of agency MEL and Tola guidance in Nigeria portfolio.
• Cross-cutting programmatic information management, monitoring and evaluation, ensuring that information collected is reflected upon, used to improve programs, and is incorporated into consistently high-quality reports and proposal development.
• The Country MEL Manager will be responsible for developing (in partnership with project staff), coordinating, maintaining, and constantly improving the portfolio -wide M&E system, as well as training M&E staff in the portfolio.
• In addition, the position holder is responsible for ensuring that the MEL reports generated by each program are timely and of high quality and that the data can be validated. This will be achieved through staff capacity building and necessary training.
• Ensuring learnings are institutionalized in the portfolio, with systems in place for analyzing and using M&E data and supporting programs to interpret and use learning for strategic and programmatic decision making. This includes contributing to the development, learning and adaptation of program strategies.

Essential Job Responsibilities

TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP – MONITORING, EVALUATION AND LEARNING

• Develop country MEL strategy, provide leadership to field offices in developing individual program level M&E systems that inform and improve each program, as well as feed into the broader nation-wide M&E system and country strategy.
• Lead and develop an M&E team structure, developing and maintaining a system that improves the country’s ability to analyze and represent impact to donors, government, colleague agencies, and communities themselves.
• Lead and/or collaborate with external evaluators on the design and roll out of the program assessments, baseline, and evaluations, while setting up effective systems for learning.
• Support teams in collecting disaggregated data (sex/age etc.) and utilizing disaggregated data to adapt our programs to be more inclusive and gender sensitive data.
• Support new business development by ensuring lessons learned are carried over and proposals have robust MEL plans and log frames.
• Contribute towards analyzing routine M&E data (both qualitative and quantitative) and generate regular output tracking reports for program teams to take informed decisions.
• Lead and provide technical contributions to research and evaluation studies across programs and develop the capacity of national team members to conduct qualitative and quantitative research, data analysis and technical report writing.
• Develop strong relationships and coordinate closely with regional, and country leadership, technical support teams, program teams, third-party monitoring, and other implementing partners, to ensure nation-wide MEL strategy is aligned with agency and field-based priorities and program opportunities.

TEAM MANAGEMENT & CAPACITY BUILDING

• Use existing MC resources, train M&E and program teams in the area of monitoring and evaluation and data utilization for decision-making.
• Build the capacity of all relevant team members to develop and maintain an excellent M&E system, including training on Tola (digital tool developed by MC) and the periodic reflection and analysis of program monitoring data to disseminate learning.
• Develop plans to mentor and coach staff to build their capacity to enable them to develop excellent reports and other documents.
• Lead efforts to establish an M&E unit working out of deep field and remote locations that will facilitate M&E for all programs and collaborate closely with Program Managers in developing and establishing of the M&E system, one that serves the needs of the overall of the country portfolio and its field officers.

MONITORING, EVALUATION AND LEARNING SYSTEM

• Manage the development and/or implementation of appropriate data management systems that provide access to timely, accurate and meaningful data.
• Ensure that these systems produce data and evidence that can be used to inform programmatic and strategic decision making and demonstrate the impact of Mercy Corps’ activities on the communities and individuals we serve.
• Support the design of evaluations and studies, including defining research questions, instruments and analysis plans, identification and recruitment of researchers, implementation to ensure quality and timelines of field work, partners and of the overall evaluation and research projects, outputs, and reports. Strategic Coordination and Collaboration

KNOWLEDGE AND INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

• Works with the program and M&E teams to adopt a holistic country-level M&E system (including Tola Data) that harnesses open-source software and flexible cloud solutions to collect, monitor and verify program activities and ensure they are aligned with country strategic and annual plan more accurately.
• Develop program and operational reporting templates that facilitate the acquisition, aggregation, and flow of information in programs.
• Support the design, quality and uptake of research and evaluations and ensure use of evidence generated by Mercy Corps Nigeria in advocacy and development of robust proposal development.
• Develop and maintain strategic learning partnership with key relevant academic and research institutions to enhance learning and advocacy efforts of Mercy Corps Nigeria.

SECURITY

• Ensure compliance with security procedures and policies as determined by country leadership.
• Proactively ensure that team members operate in a secure environment and are aware of policies.

Supervisory Responsibility

• Program MEL Managers/Advisors/Coordinators (depending on program structure), CLA Advisors

Accountability

Reports Directly To: Program Performance and Quality Director.
Works Directly With: Deputy/Chiefs of Party, Program Directors/Managers, Consortium partners MEL, PaQ Unit, Technical Sector Advisors, and other support functions (Operations and Finance), Regional MEL Advisor, and HQ PaQ

Accountability to Participants and Stakeholders

Mercy Corps team members are expected to support all efforts toward accountability, specifically to our program participants, community partners, other stakeholders, and to international standards guiding international relief and development work. We are committed to actively engaging communities as equal partners in the design, monitoring and evaluation of our field projects.

Minimum Qualifications & Transferable Skills

• BA/S degree or equivalent in development studies, business administration, statistics, economics, social sciences, monitoring and evaluation, project management or other relevant field required. MA/S in relevant field strongly preferred.
• Experience working with quantitative data analysis software like SPSS/STATA/R/Python and qualitative software like ATLAS.ti or NVivo or equivalent preferred
• Experience using mobile data collection tools like Survey CTO or ODK preferred.
• Minimum 5 years of experience in the areas of program development and monitoring and evaluation in development and/or emergency contexts, including relevant advisory/leadership experience building and managing an M&E system and team, supervising data collection and data validation exercises, and building staff capacity.
• Must have extensive training skills and experience working with a variety of donors, such as USAID, EU and FCDO.
• Ability to manage and meet deadlines.
• Ability to work independently and innovate
• Excellent communication and organizational skills.
• Internationally recognized qualification in project or program management or a commitment to obtain the qualification in the early months of work.
• Knowledge of Sphere standards and other training in humanitarian response preferred.