SENIOR TECHNICAL ADVISOR, MONITORING, EVALUATION & LEARNING, FOOD & WATER SYSTEMS at CARE

CARE is an international NGO with local staff and community partners in more than 90 countries. We create local solutions to poverty and inequality and we seek dignity for everyone every day and during times of crisis. These solutions have a broad range, from clean water to access to education; from microfinance to ensuring that everyone has nutritious food; from agriculture and climate change to disaster response. CARE puts women and girls at the center of everything we do because they have proven to be the best hope for creating lasting change in the world. Our staff live where they work, which makes us effective at understanding the challenges they face. We’ve been doing this for over 70 years, since World War II. It started with the world’s first CARE Package® of food for the post-war hungry in Europe. Our work today is as important as ever, we believe that poverty and inequality are historic injustices that we can end within a generation, for good. If you share our core beliefs: poverty is an injustice; poverty is solvable; and together, we have the power to end it, join us, and fight with CARE.

Gender equality and empowerment of women and girls is at the center of CARE’s Food and Water Systems (FWS) programs. CARE commits to support 75 million people, majority of them women and girls, to fulfill their rights to food, water and nutrition security as part of CARE’s Vision 2030.

CARE’s proven, women-focused Farmers’ Field and Business School (FFBS) approach helps small-scale farmers build the skills they need to increase production, improve resilience, adapt to climate change, diversify diets and boost nutrition. Since 2014, FFBS has directly improved the lives of more than 2.5 million farmers especially, women and their families. CARE has now lunched a new global 6 years long program that will upscale the FFBS model to new countries and promoting adoption of FFBS by governments. Upscaling FFBS directly ties into CARE’s strategic priorities contained in CARE’s Vision 2030 and is aligned with CARE’s Right to Food, Water and Nutrition Impact Area Strategy and the She Feeds the World (SFtW) strategic framework, which highlights FFBS as a critical lever for our work in food systems.

The role of the FFBS Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Senior Technical Advisor, reporting directly to the FFBS Program Manager, will primarily be as follows:

Responsibilities:

• MEL support to global programming on FFBS: provide strategic oversight for FFBS and other similar programs/projects; provide intensive support to FFBS projects, ensuring high quality and rigor of MEL systems and thus contributing to effective knowledge management and learning as well as donor reporting.
• Provide technical backstopping on MEL to FFBS programs: support FFBS program/project teams for finalization of MEL systems, Theories of Change, Log Frames, program indicators, and other MEL elements; coordinate and review FFBS program/project annual/semi-annual report and provide feedback to concern teams to ensure high quality reporting; lead the capacity building efforts and contribute towards providing training and support to all FFBS MEL and program staff.
• Support design of new proposals: designing high impact, competitive, and ultimately successful FFBS programs will involve supporting program design efforts to ensure that the MEL sections are well conceived, rigorous and fully in line with the program’s Theory of Change. The STA will ensure that MEL in all the FFBS programing are according to the CARE’s MEL principles and standards, using a wide range of available tools and resources.
• Knowledge management and learning: support Country Office (CO) staff to identify and capture innovations, best or promising practices, and lessons learned and to translate these breakthroughs into tools, systems, processes, and/or approaches to increase technical excellence; lead the execution of research, learning and knowledge management on FFBS in the FWS Unit; Contribute to the review and policy analysis, capacity building to government officials and field staff of ministries of agriculture with the goal of getting FFBS policies and approaches adopted and budgeted for.
• Support implementation of CARE CI’s PIIRS on FFBS: support data validation of reach and impact data for FFBS and RFWN impact area.

Qualifications:

• Higher education (Master’s degree) on relevant subjects (e.g. statistics, anthropology, sociology, agricultural research or related field).
• At least 5 years of experience in monitoring and evaluation in a developing country context or within an international development organization in the agriculture/food, water and nutrition security context.
• Demonstrated experience providing technical and programmatic support in monitoring and evaluation.
• Experience in designing and implementing highly effective and efficient MEL systems that deliver accurate and timely information for reporting and evaluation.
• Experience of working on FFBS, FFS or other community-based extension programing design and/or monitoring and evaluation.
• Interpersonal and intercultural communications skills, with the ability to communicate knowledge in a manner appropriate to diverse audiences.
• Proven ability to work in partnership with other professionals, and to support learning and sharing of lessons and best practices.
• Demonstrated abilities in strategic planning, management, and oversight of complex technical initiatives.
• Experience in development of effective and competitive MEL plans for proposals.
• Knowledge of and experience with indicators and methods used for monitoring agriculture-based livelihoods, food, water and nutrition programs.
• Familiarity with commonly used software applications for MEL.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English.

Preferred locations: Atlanta, DC, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, Malawi, Zambia, Bangladesh, Niger, Turkey, Jordan, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras