Monitoring and Evaluation Manager - Mubi

Background/IRC Summary:

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people to survive and rebuild their lives. Founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein, the IRC offers lifesaving care and life-changing assistance to refugees forced to flee from war or disaster. At work today in over 40 countries and 22 U.S. cities, we restore safety, dignity and hope to millions who are uprooted and struggling to endure. The IRC leads the way from harm to home.

IRC has been present in Nigeria since 2012 when the organization responded to flooding in Kogi state.  In early 2014, IRC opened a field office in Mubi town of Adamawa state in NE Nigeria followed by offices in Yola (Adamawa state) in November 2014 and Maiduguri (Borno state) in October 2015.  The IRC Nigeria country program is implementing multi-sectoral interventions in the sectors of: Health and Nutrition; Environmental Health; Child Protection; Education; Women’s Protection and Empowerment; Food Security and Livelihoods and Protection. Most of these programs are driven in partnership with strategic local NGOs.

Job Overview/Summary:

Under the supervision of the Senior Roving M&E Manager, the M&E Manager ensure all projects have suitable monitoring and evaluation systems, and regularly review and maintain the systems.The manager will also be responsible to incorporate relevant program indicators into the projects M&E systems that enables to measure the contribution of individual projects in achieving program objectives. In general, the major purposes of the M&E Manager position is to provide strategic guidance and support to the core program team in establishing both program and project M&E systems.

The position holder has the role of supervising M&E Officers.As a result, s/he is primarily responsible for building M&E staff capacity through organizing trainings, mentoring, coaching and supervision.Together with the Senior Roving M&E Manager, S/he technically supports IRC Nigeria to meet standards set out in the Strategic Action Plan (SAP 2020), Client responsiveness objectives and IRC’s global Monitoring for Action (MfA) initiative for improving monitoring practice and use of data for decision making within the organization.

Major Responsibilities:

Program/project design and learning (20% of time)

• Participate in program/ project design specially in developing logframes;
• Responsible for ensuring detailed and feasible project monitoring plans are developed. This include: i) provide an indicator matrix, ii) consider ethical and safe collection and storage of data, iii) consider data quality audits, vi) consider storing, protecting and sharing project documents;
• Accountable for working with M&E Officers to make sure all projects have tested standard monitoring tools that capture both program activity and indicators progresses.
• Responsible for making sure all projects have accountability mechanisms up and running.
• Responsible for working with program/project managers and support to determine which monitoring activities will take place and which data collection methods will be used to ensure their adequacy and appropriateness.
• Work closely with Senior M&E Manager and support to ensure that project design in proposals is logically sound, beneficiary-informed and contextually appropriate, based on learning from previous projects and technical best practice, and includes a Theory of Change and SMART log frame (with IRC core indicators and enabling assessment of project progress, quality, outcomes, and if relevant impact);
• Accountable for conducting and documenting end of project learning reviews, and sharing lessons learned and best practices, incorporating these into new project designs.
• In consultation with the Senior Roving M&E Manager, organize lesson sharing events like lesson bazars to fertilize learning among different projects and/or sectors.
• Responsible for identifying, documenting, storing, and sharing lessons learned that have implications for refinement of best programmatic practice.
• Responsible for leading diagnostic studies, evaluations, and surveys.

Monitoring and evaluation (25% of time)

• Responsible for facilitating the preparations of monthly/annul project activity plans including M&E plans.
• Accountable for working with M&E staff to determine which monitoring activities will take place and which data collection methods to use.
• Accountable for working with M&E staff to ensure that the project work plans include monitoring activities (or that a stand-alone monitoring work plan is in place), is up-to date and progress tracked.
• Responsible for working with M&E Officers and project staff to develop, translate, pilot, and finalize data collection tools as needed.
• Responsible for design survey data collection tools and methodologies.
• Together with the respective Core Program M&E Officer, establish project/program databases and/or tracking sheets.
• Responsible for following up with projects M&E officers to ensure data is collected and entered into databases and/or tracking sheets, and/or the data platform on a regular basis.
• Support M&E officers to working with project staff to track progress on action points related to implementation and M&E activities.
• Responsible for working with project staff to provide M&E inputs for reports written during project implementation.
• Responsible for developing and implementing strategies for tracking cross-cutting issues.
• Responsible for closely following up field data collection and flag data collection issues to the Senior Roving M&E Manager and project staff.
• Responsible for conducting data quality audits of project data to identify and resolve systemic problems affecting data quality.
• Accountable for documenting findings from data quality audits and store in project files to ensure collective and sustainable access.
• Responsible for conducting reflective practice forums at field office/ project level and compile lessons from project implementation processes.

Information management and reporting (20% of time)

• Responsible for providing M&E inputs for regular analysis and action planning meetings to (1) compare data against project milestones, targets, and quality expectations across project sites; (2) identify issues requiring concerned staff attention.
• Responsible for extracting lessons learned from projects, systematically document and make easily accessible to staff.
• Accountable for supporting M&E staff in ensuring all projects have downward/ forward accountability mechanisms and functional.
• Support M&E Officers to ensure that data is collected and entered into databases and/or tracking sheets, and/or the data platform on a regular basis.

Staff capacity building (25% of time)

• Accountable for preparing M&E staff mentoring coaching plans and implement accordingly.
• Responsible for training staff in data collection methods, management, analysis, and how to use data for decision making.
• Accountable for recruitment of M&E staff, enumerators, and HR onboarding.
• Responsible for providing consistent, supportive supervision to strengthen staff performance as necessary to meet monitoring objectives.

Perform other duties assigned by the supervisor (10% of time)

• Perform other task related assignment proposed by his/her supervisor/s

Key Working Relationships:

Position Reports to: Senior Roving M&E Manager

Position directly supervises: Field M&E Officers

Indirect Reporting: M&E Coordinator/Program Coordinators/Senior Area Manager/Program Manager