Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) Specialist at Americares

Job Title: Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Specialist

Location: Mwanza, Tanzania

About Americares:
Americares is a health-focused relief and development organization that saves lives and improves health for people affected by poverty or disaster. Each year, Americares reaches 85 countries on average, including the United States, with life-changing health programs, medicine, medical supplies, and emergency aid. Americares is one of the world’s leading nonprofit providers of donated medicine and medical supplies. For more information, visit americares.org
About Community Partnerships for Respectful Care (CPRC) project:
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under the New Partnerships Initiative (NPI) has awarded to the Americares Foundation Inc.. NPI is shifting the focus of USAID’s traditional partners to mentoring, capacity-building, and technical oversight, by using umbrella mechanisms and sub-awards strategically to enable new and underutilized local partners to lead development in their own communities and advance the Journey to Self-Reliance. USAID seeks to expand its network of partnerships with local organizations because they can mobilize quickly and take advantage of long-standing grassroots relationships to bring needed interventions directly to people at risk.

The Americares Community Partnerships for Respectful Care (CPRC) project is a five-year (2020-2025), $8.7 million effort under NPI to reduce mortality and morbidity among mothers and their children through improved community-based health care. Americares works with Christian Social Service Commission (CSSC) as its local Subaward in the United Republic of Tanzania to leverage locally established organizations’ expertise and reach by building their institutional capacity. This new partnership will work closely with Tanzanian communities and faith-based networks to improve access to, and demand for, high-quality, community-based health care for mothers, newborns, and children; voluntary family planning; nutrition; and respectful maternity care.

POSITION SUMMARY:
The Tanzania MEL Specialist will oversee all aspects of the CPRC monitoring, evaluation, and learning in Tanzania. Under the supervision of the Project Director, the MEL Specialist will coordinate with the CPRC project three technical leads for Community Engagement & Social and Behavior Change(CE&SBC), Maternal and Newborn Health(MNH), and Family Planning(FP). In addition, the Specialist will work closely with and build capacities to partner M&E teams and activities, particularly during data collection and analysis. The CPRC MEL Specialist will ensure the application of best practices for data collection, analysis, reporting, learning within the project team and with a larger audience, including donors and Ministry of Health (MOH) stakeholders. The position will require an emphasis on working closely with the Americares HQ M&E Director or his designee and on creating externally relevant results and progress reports.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:
Monitoring Activities -Lead the MEL unit in supporting the CPRC project in tracking and measuring achievement and progress towards activity goals and results.
-Ensuring that Subaward (CSSC), and other partners collect quality data that meets the USAID data requirements, including the different levels of disaggregation (sex, age, and geographic disaggregation).
-Lead capacity building of MEL technical aspects to CSSC staff and other partners.
-Lead monitoring of program quality using quality benchmarks and ensure that findings from Key Program Indicators (KPIs) are shared with relevant stakeholders and explicitly fed back into program decision making.
-Ensure data management information systems are in place and accessible to everyone at anytime.
-Lead data entry and data analysis with partners.
-Lead in data quality assessment for CPRC and other partners by regularly verifying and validating data reported monthly, quarterly, and annually to ensure completeness, accuracy, and validity.
-Contribute toward continuous review of approaches used to implement activities and advise CPRC technical leads for Community Engagement & SBC, MNH, and FP, and the Project Director.
-Providing technical assistance in the development, selection, and application of MEL processes and tools.

Evaluation Activities
-Lead CPRC project during baseline and end line activities, with the support of the Project Director.
-Lead in-country assessments and annual project evaluation to track achievements and changes toward reaching the CPRC project overall goal in Tanzania.
-Under the guidance of the Project Director and HQ M&E Director perform additional or complementary analysis of data collected, including baseline and end-line data.
-Lead the development of terms of reference and methodology design for in-country program monitoring level reviews and evaluations to ensure that processes will generate relevant learning on respectful care.
-Support internal and external activities evaluations as necessary.

Learning
-Maintain detailed knowledge and lessons learned, best practices and issues.
-Continuously support the program team and the sub-grantee in improving approaches and processes.
-Inform and work with the Project Director in reviewing and, where appropriate developing and testing complementary tools to ensure high-quality implementation, risk management, stakeholder analysis, root cause analysis, project status report, quality management, minimum program standard and implementation checklist.
-Contribute to developing presentations, abstracts, articles and publications through data analysis, tabulation, visualization and supporting data interpretation.

Reports and Updates
-Contribute to the development and implementation of learning efforts and documentation and sharing of findings and best practices.
-Submit weekly updates and monthly reports to the CPRC Project Director that monitor implementation and achievements.
-Support the Project Director to prepare quarterly and annual reports for submission to USAID.

Coordination
-Maintain contact with partners and stakeholders to ensure timely and regular flow of information and data
-Develop and roll-out capacity building and refresher training efforts and ensure full participation of sub-grantee and MOH stakeholders in all MEL efforts.
-Develop on an annual-basis MEL work plan.
-Take full responsibility for the in-country MEL dashboard that present an overview of accomplishments, MEL needs, budget, and planning review.
-Lead the MEL component during the regular project review.

Core Americares Responsibilities:
Foster Americares values of responsiveness, accountability, collaboration and effectiveness.
Coach, support, and develop staff to increase individual and team effectiveness; and
Develop and manage the implementation of plans to increase team operating performance, including SOPs and other efficiency initiatives.

Qualifications:

-Master’s degree in Health Monitoring and Evaluation, Public Health, Social science, Epidemiology, Statistics, or related disciplines is required.
-Experience of working in RMNCAH including family planning, nutrition, and community development projects is highly desirable, especially the ones involving capacity building for sub-granted local NGOs/CSOs in Tanzania.
-Minimum of 5 years of working experience in monitoring and evaluating international health sector development projects, with a strong preference for candidates’ previous experience working with the public health sector in building and strengthening data collection and reporting systems.
-Demonstrated experience of working with USAID large-scale programs, including knowledge of USAID’s reporting requirements.
-Familiar with Tanzania health management information systems, including data quality assessments and manipulation of DHIS2, experience in presenting RMNCAH and Nutrition data to MOH, PO-RALG, and other implementing partners is a credit.
-Experience in setting up M&E systems, design and implementation.
-Strong technical and analytical skills, including ability to analyze qualitative and quantitative data using one or more statistical software packages, such as SPSS, Stata, SAS, Nvivo, Atlas.ti.
-Good knowledge in conducting qualitative and quantitative research studies and excellent in analytical and report writings skills.
-Proven experience and knowledge in the documentation of program outcomes and impact.
-Experience in working with and being accountable to multiple stakeholders and multilayers settings, a huge plus
-Excellent interpersonal skills and strong communications skills; ability to develop partnerships across sectors and cultures.
-Ability to coach, mentor, and build MEL technical capacity to fellow staff.
-Strong organizational skills, capacity to think strategically and attention to detail
-Excellent English-language writing skills and demonstrated experience meeting USAID and other donors reporting requirements.
-Proficiency in Office 365 including Word, Excel, Teams, PowerPoint, and SharePoint.
-Willingness and ability to travel as needed.
-Unrestricted authorization to work in Tanzania.