Monitoring and Evaluation Officer at Mercy Corps

Job Description

Monitoring and Evaluation Officer at Mercy Corps

The Program / Department Summary

USAID’s Office of Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance (BHA) awarded funding to a Mercy Corps-led consortium of Kenyan and international partners for an 8-year Resilience Food Security Activity (DFSA) in Turkana and Samburu Counties of Kenya. Through a phased approach that emphasizes evidence gap analysis, as well as partnership, learning, and co-creation with government, civil society, communities, and the private sector, the USAID Nawiri program aims to drive sustained reductions in acute malnutrition in both counties. Mercy Corps’ consortium brings together the global leadership, research capacity, technical expertise, and implementation experience necessary to partner with local institutions to test, adapt, and scale evidence-based solutions. The program requires a robust county-centered design with government leadership, active engagement from communities, the private sector, and civil society. Together we will sustainably reduce persistent acute malnutrition for vulnerable populations in Turkana and Samburu counties.

General Position Summary

The Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Officer is a key position for program quality assurance, accountability, documentation, and learning. The position holder will support the USAID Nawiri team in planning and execution of monitoring and evaluation activities at the county level while ensuring implementation quality in accordance with accepted standards, providing essential feedback for learning, accountability and decision making. The Position holder will support the program adaptive management agenda i.e. collaborating, learning, and adapting. Support county and sub-county teams in rolling-out a responsive M&E system that can provide updated and relevant information for effective program implementation. Support capacity building of program staff, County Data Focal Point Officers and M&E Assistants on data collection, analysis and visualization as well as strengthening the existing systems to be able to produce reliable/quality data and support data platforms, used for decision-making at sub-county and ward level.

Essential Responsibilities

STRATEGY AND PLANNING

• Support development and roll-out of USAID Nawiri monitoring and evaluation strategy and tools.
• Participate in platforms for program management and collaboration at county and sub-county level and promote evidence-based county and program adaptive management. Support program targeting, design, integration, layering and sequencing and support tracking of resilience programing at county and sub-county level.
• Provide M&E leadership to Program teams and M&E Assistants at sub-county level and ensure program implementation coherence and integration.

RESULT BASED MONITORING & EVALUATION

• Conduct data collection, collation, review, validation, and analysis of program data at county, sub-county, and Ward Level.
• Support the County Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Coordinator to roll-out M&E Plan at county and sub-county level.
• In conjunction with the County MEL Coordinator, development of supportive supervision and mentoring plan for the program team on data collection, entry, analysis and use for decision-making.
• Support learning initiatives at county and sub-county level including facilitating documentation of lessons learned and success stories.
• In collaboration with the MIS team, conduct program participant registration and maintain updates program participants databases to at county, sub-county, and Ward-level.
• Support in conducting regular Routine Data Quality Assurance (RDQA) in collaboration with the program team for the reported data to ensure adherence to USAID/ Mercy Corps data quality standards.
• Support County Program team in the preparation of quarterly/annual activity reports and verification of reported data.
• Participate in county government M&E system strengthening strategy at sub-county and ward level including roll-out of Actionable Context monitoring system at county, sub-county and ward-level including ensuring data use for planning and decision-making at all levels.
• Participate in annual surveys, Qualitative Inquiries (QI) and Post Distribution Monitoring Surveys intended to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of USAID Nawiri programing at county level and meet required BHA reporting requirements Ensure adherence to Mercy Corps program management minimum standards and Community Accountability Mechanism (CARM)

CAPACITY BUILDING

• Facilitate program teams in periodic reflection and analysis of project monitoring information that feeds into USAID Nawiri programming and learning and sub-county and ward-level.
• Support timely production of weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual donor reports based on agreed performance indicators and timelines.
• Build the capacity of all relevant team members to implement program-monitoring tools, accurately enter program data into relevant databases, and enable them to develop excellent reports and other documents.

 PROGRAM ADVISORY

• Maintain an active advisory role with the program team to help guide them towards robust and relevant data collection, validation, analysis, and decision-making.
• Actively participate in all implementation monitoring, providing timely feedback on quality-of-service delivery at any point.
• Establish and maintain strong working relationships with partners and government departments.
• Support the process of testing and adopting relevant technologies for improving the efficiency of the program’s MEL function. This will include supporting testing and rollout of Mobile Data Collection tools (Ona), CommCare, GIS/GPS technologies for Mapping, and managing MCK’s internal data management platform, Tola Data.

OTHER

• Maintain professional and personal conduct that brings credit to Mercy Corps and does not jeopardize its humanitarian mission.
• Other duties as assigned from time to time by supervisor.

Supervisory Responsibility

M&E Assistants, Temporary Research Assistants.

Accountability

Reports Directly to: County M&E Coordinator with administrative oversight from the Field Director

Works Directly with: USAID Nawiri Program Quality and Learning team, all program staff and implementing partners at county and sub-county level.

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 Qualification & Transferable Skills

• Must hold at least a bachelor’s degree in social science, Statistics, International development, Health, Agriculture or relevant field (with coursework in M&E, research and evaluation methodologies, statistical analysis or organizational development) or similar field of study.
• At least 2-4 years of program monitoring and evaluation experience
• Experience working with USAID funded project and familiarity with USAID/FFP M&E guidance and requirement is an added advantage.
• Should understand general MEL concepts and demonstrate skills in MEL system (i.e. Theories of Change, Results Frameworks/Logical Frameworks, MEL Plans and Data Collection tools);
• Must have good writing and analytical skills.
• Should have knowledge of quantitative and qualitative data collection, reporting techniques. The position holder should understand and be able to apply basic measures of central tendency and spread.
• In addition to Microsoft Excel, the incumbent should demonstrate fluency in use of at least one data management software including SPSS, STATA, and Power BI/Tableau for visualization.
• Must be fluent in both spoken and written English. Understanding of local language will be an added advantage.

Monitoring and Evaluation Officer at Mercy Corps