senior meal advisor

JOB SUMMARY:

CARE is seeking an experienced and creative monitoring, evaluation, adaptation and learning specialist to join the management team of a for an11M digital impact program focused on advancing meaningful digital adoption and use of the internet for women and girls, strengthening lives and livelihoods while influencing digital ecosystems through evidence and learning. Employing a strong localization approach, the program will create opportunities for organizations and businesses across Sub-Saharan Africa to advance effective and replicable approaches to digital inclusion for women while generating insights and lessons for others to adopt and implement. 

About the role: As the Senior MEAL Advisor for this effort, you will champion and operationalize the learning agenda developed by the donors and CARE. You will be the MEAL specialist in a small team characterized by passion for locally-focused digital development, impactful partnerships, and great data. You will be responsible for defining the measurement tools and systems we will deploy across all program investments to monitor performance and generate data that supports both the learning agenda and emerging lessons. You will make sure the program honors the theory of change and evaluation frameworks that promote sense-making and communicate impact. You will build partnerships with sub-awardees and manage vendors to support the consistent collection, management, and analysis of data from across the program's investment portfolio. You will coordinate the consolidation of program results, performance and lessons for a wide range of audiences, and create opportunities for cross-program/sub-awardee information sharing. 

About you: The position requires exceptional skills working across cultures to support innovative program design, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and learning; development of sound tools and operating procedures to assure quality implementation and measurement of achievement; proven methods to enhance data use for decision making; excellent communication and presentations skills, including proven diplomacy with high-level stakeholders; and sound written and oral skills. Successful candidates will bring a clear track record of building creative, cost-effective, multi-country measurement and learning systems that support decision making and performance monitoring. You will have experience with complex gender and social norms programming and an understanding of effective tools or tactics for measuring change in these domains. We want a team player who is ready to jump into a small, quickly-moving team and make it work

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Develop and Manage MEAL Systems

• Lead the development and management of the program MEAL System for a 3.5 year program in line with the program theory of change and learning priorities 
• Develop and/or define key performance indicators and impact metrics, drawing on existing indicators and tested tools as much as possible 
• Develop data collection instruments and systems to support responsible data management and timely reporting between sub-awardees, CARE, and donors 

• Manage and/or generate routine reports, drawing on MEAL system to assess program progress, identify emerging lessons and illustrate opportunities for improvement

Manage data collection approaches and data management vendors

• Recruit and manage regional MEAL consultants and/or firms to support the delivery of the program MEAL system 
• Help articulate an evidence base that supporting the learning agenda 
• Extract insights from previous programming to inform impact assessments 

• Connect with KM colleagues across CARE and the larger public to share data and findings

Training, capacity building, and sharing learnings

• Create excellent rapport with sub-awardees and provide technical assistance across MEAL activities 
• Deliver capacity building and training support to program sub-grantees as needed 
• Create opportunity for cross-regional "sharing and learning" events - online, in person as possible, etc. 

• Willingness to travel up to 35% of the time

Represent program with internal and external audiences

• Generating and/or supporting others to generate program reports and presentations 
• Presenting program updates to internal stakeholders and donors 
• Representing the program in external events and conferences