MEL Manager at Mercy Corps

General Position Summary

The Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Manager is a key member of the Program Performance and Quality (PAQ) Unit and will be responsible for managing and coordinating all MEL and program quality performance processes for Mercy Corps Nigeria’s Humanitarian programs. S/he will work across all Northeast programs to support data collection, management, and analysis.

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 programs.
• Lead and/or collaborate with external evaluators on the design and rollout of the program assessments, baseline and evaluations, while setting up effective systems for learning.
• Ensures programs use the necessary M&E systems and tools, to inform and improve each individual 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.
• Identify research opportunities and partnerships that respond to priority topics and questions, and which connect to Mercy Corp’s field emergency response programming and national and regional strategic plans.
• Lead on both internal and external Data Quality Assessment (DQA) in collaboration with BHA Third Party Monitoring partners.

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 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 private and institutional funding reports for programs and review project/program reports to ensure that reports contain accurate, clear, and high-quality data and are 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 the 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 ensures 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 sector clusters (majorly on joint assessments in Borno State) and 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 international NGOs and local NGOs and associations 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.

Knowledge and Experience

• BA/S degree in development studies, research methods, statistics, economics, social sciences, monitoring and evaluation, project management or other relevant field required. Postgraduate degree preferred.
• 3-5 years of active M&E work experience in emergency and development programming required with the proven use of program technology.
• 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 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.
• Experience working on USAID programs preferred.
• Previous experience living and working in challenging or insecure environments.
• Fluency in spoken and written English is required.
• Knowledge of Hausa and other local dialects is preferred.