Job opportunity: MEAL Coordinator

Employment Type: Plein temps

Compensation: XOF 0,00 – 0,00 Salarié

Location: Maroua, Cameroon

Job Description

Job Title: MEAL Coordinator

Location: Maroua, Buea or Yaounde- Cameroon

Reporting to: Deputy Director for Program

BACKGROUND

The International Rescue Committee, one of the world’s largest humanitarian agencies, provides relief, rehabilitation and post-conflict reconstruction support to victims of natural disaster, oppression and violent conflict in 42 countries. The IRC is committed to bold leadership, innovation and creative partnerships. Active in public health, education, livelihoods, women’s empowerment, youth development, and protection and promotion of rights, IRC assists people from harm to home.

COUNTRY BACKGROUND

The IRC started operations in Cameroon in 2016 to respond to the increasing concerns for people affected by violence linked to Boko Haram, in the Far North of the country. Assistance to displaced populations extends across the Far North, notably Mayo Sava, Mayo Tsanaga and Logone & Chari, delivering lifesaving programming to increase access to water and improving hygiene practices in vulnerable displaced and host communities, cash programming to enable poor families to meet basic needs and improve food security, and protection programming, including meeting specific needs of women and girls. Following the increasing crisis in the North-West and South-West regions of Cameroon, the IRC expanded its operations into the South West region in August 2018, delivering lifesaving humanitarian assistance to internally displaced populations. The IRC’s field offices are located in Maroua and Kousseri in the Far North, Buea in the South-West, and a representation office in Yaoundé.

IRC Cameroon is committed in its Strategic Action Plan 100 to continue to provide essential humanitarian services, with a focus on safety in communities and ensuring affected populations can meet their basic needs, whilst also building the resilience of beneficiaries, especially women and girls.

JOB SUMMARY/OVERALL PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

With direct management support from Deputy Director of Program and technical support from the Regional Measurement Action Coordinator, the Monitoring Evaluation, Accountability and Learning Coordinator will provide technical leadership for design and delivery of all monitoring, evaluation, client responsiveness and learning activities and products in IRC Cameroon, and ensure strong knowledge and information management. Providing technical leadership to IRC Cameroon’s MEAL team, the MEAL Coordinator’s work will contribute to ensuring high quality programming for the IRC’s clients and support IRC Cameroon to realise its Strategy 100 ambitions.

She/ He will ensure that suitable monitoring and evaluation systems, aligned to organisational expectations, are in place and implemented as intended, ensuring that the right people have the right data at the right time and enabling program coordinators and managers to deliver programs that achieve the desired outcomes /impacts, whilst learning from evidence. S/he will identify MEAL capacity gaps in the country program and design and deliver strategies to fill any gaps and create an atmosphere of individual and collective learning that supports professional development and the meeting of organisational expectations. Furthermore, with support from the Deputy Directly of Programs, the MEAL Coordinator will support the program coordinators and managers in ensuring timely submission of all reporting requirements, including internal and external evaluations. The MEAL Coordinator will engage in regional and global IRC Measurement initiatives and support the wider engagement of IRC Cameroon staff and facilitate cross-learning at all levels within and beyond the country office.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Strategic Leadership and Partnership

• Establish and drive common strategies and approaches to the country’s Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning processes that reflect and contextualize Strategy 100 and the Country Strategic Action Plan and ensure that the MEAL structure is fit for this purpose;
• Technically support IRC Cameroon to meet impact goal and data ambition set out in Strategic Action Plan (SAP 2022 – 2024 and IRC’s global Measurement and Client Responsiveness
• Represent the IRC on MEAL at internal and external meetings, forums, and other events;
• Shape and implement MEAL systems and approaches that meet IRC standards and practices, that meet project and program needs, enable accountability to clients, partners, and donors, and foster program learning;
• Reinforce integration of cross-sectoral priorities in MEAL, including gender, protection, safeguarding, disaster risk reduction, Diversity-Equality-Inclusion and Do No Harm.
• Work with country leadership and program team to promote a program quality culture and evidence-based decision making in programming within IRC and its partners
• For IRC cross-cutting MEAL priorities, design, resource and deliver task specific action plans in collaboration with Program Coordinators and the SMT. Plans need communicate to key IRC stakeholders’ requirements for budget, people, systems and technical support, alongside risk mitigation strategies.

Technical Oversight

Monitoring

• Responsible for ensuring that detailed and feasible project monitoring plans are developed for each project that: i) provide an indicator matrix, ii) map M&E roles and responsibilities of project and support staff, iii) consider ethical and safe collection and storage of data, iv) consider data quality audits, v) consider storing, protecting and sharing project documents, and vi) consider the end of project learning review;
• Responsible for providing technical oversight and support for establishment and maintenance of routine monitoring systems, presentation of findings and building related staff competencies;
• Assist in conducting regular analysis and action planning meetings to (1) compare data against project milestones, targets, and quality expectations across project sites; (2) identify issues requiring further attention; (3) define action needed and assign responsibility and deadlines;
• Support the digitisation and automation of programme data flows at all levels;
• Work with staff at regional and country levels to establish and maintain data collection tools, project/program databases, and indictor tracking sheets and dashboards that promote the standardisation of MEAL processes and products;
• Define staff roles and responsibilities in relation to the collection, entry, sharing, verification, analysis, and use of data and share with the concerned staff;
• Conduct regular monitoring visits to all projects to ensure that all projects are on the right track in performing the planned activities and achieved the expected outputs;
• Ensure that monitoring data are fed into management decisions and used in program management;
• Identify major challenges for project implementation and report to the senior management team for immediate decision making;
• Review and appraise MEAL components of programmatic reports and provide feedback to support improvements of record keeping and reporting of programmatic data;
• Preparation and timely submission of MEAL reports to the senior management team;
• Coordinate the development of an effective monitoring and evaluation and data systems management capacity, procedures, tools, associated methodologies and key documents to ensure standardization in evaluation and reporting practices.

Evaluation

• Along with program staff, prepare TORs for all surveys, evaluations and need assessments carried out both internally and by external evaluators when he/she will facilitate the whole process and ensure the quality of deliverables;
• Responsible for the design, quality, development, and completion of all assessments and evaluations;
• Responsible for conducting advanced analysis (inferential statistics) of needs assessment and survey data;
• Organize meetings and produce reports for wider dissemination of project accomplishments; including external evaluation reports that go along with the donor reports
• Liaise with academic institutions and/or with the Research and Innovation unit at IRC, or relevant Technical Unit Advisors, as necessary for evaluation, assessment and learning activities.

Accountability

• Ensure that IRC’s client responsiveness Policies and Procedures are widely available and applied by both IRC Cameroon staff and partners;
• Ensure all client feedback collected are systematically recorded and responded to within the time agreed;
• Establish a sustainable Complaints and feedback Mechanism, plan and budget at field office level which ensures i)all clients can make confidential complaints and feedback, and be confident in response processes and ii) clients views are routinely collected across all projects through proactive and reactive feedback channels
• Ensure that IRC Cameroon’s client responsiveness SOP is in place and upto date;
• In coordination with field coordinators, design and deliver training and refresher modules that ensure all staffs have an in-depth understanding of Client-Responsive programming, IRC Cameroon’s client responsiveness SOP and CHS standards, and are equipped to apply these in their working lives;
• Conduct quarterly clients’ consultation meetings to get feedback from IRC Cameroon’s clients on improvements to program quality;
• Ensure PSEA mechanism is in place and functional, that focal points receive appropriate training and monitoring, in collaboration with the SMT and the PSEA focal point in country;
• Coordinate the development of IEC materials and client and community communication strategies for dissemination of the IRC’s Client Responsiveness policy and procedures, and the expectations and standards required of IRC’s and partner staff;

Learning

• In collaboration with the SMT, technical coordinators and technical units, outline a country program learning strategy outlining key learning priorities across all sectors. Priorities can be cross-sectoral;
• Identify resources to carry out strategic learning, both financial and human, and coordinate with the Regional Measurement for Action Coordinator, relevant Technical Units and the IRC Research, Evaluation and Learning unit to identify methodologies and plan the implementation of the learning strategy;
• Participate in program design and proposal discussions, including incorporation of past learning, support on theory of change development, log frame design, and budgeting for M&E;
• Assist in conducting and documenting end of project learning reviews, and sharing lessons learned and best practices, incorporating these into the design of new project designs;
• Facilitate Project Reflection Meetings under the framework of the IRC’s Project Cycle Meetings, and share actionable notes in an accessible format to the relevant staff members, including local partners.

Information management and reporting

• Aligned to the IRC’s organisational expectations, establish and maintain a system to efficiently manage and make available large volumes of monitoring and assessment data, using relevant software packages including mobile data collection for projects;
• Establish overall country program core indicator tracking sheets and dashboards;
• Contribute to the quarterly SAP- IP report and the MMR;
• Conduct assessments on information management gaps and suggest improvements and remedial action to the senior management team;
• Ensure key project/program documents are centrally stored in Box and easily accessible by staff;
• With the support of the Client Responsiveness Officer, prepare and share the quarterly Client Responsiveness report, compiling and visualizing trends of clients’ feedback data from different channels;
• Compile annual statistic for the Cameroon country programme and share with the SMT, Regional Office, and HQ;
• Participate in PCM meetings and lead the analysis of key indicators for regular project monitoring and decision-making;
• Document and promote good practices, knowledge management and organizational learning around monitoring, evaluation and Client Responsiveness approaches and incorporate lessons learned, best practices and technical innovation in plans and project designs.

Project Cycle Meetings and Learning

• To support project teams on project management work occurring in and around these meetings as it relates to MEAL. Specifically, key responsibilities here (largely in line with current MEAL responsibilities) include:
• Joining meetings as directed in the Project Cycle Meetings Guidance – participates in every PDM, POM, PIM, and PCM.
• Supporting project teams on key MEAL-related tasks – specifically, MEAL staff in Project Cycle Meetings will support MEAL plan development as well as data collection and interpretation
• Lead and support in development and implementation of country knowledge and learnings agenda.
• Assist in conducting and documenting end of project learning reviews, and sharing lessons learned and best practices, incorporating these into new project designs.
• Assist in identifying, documenting, storing and sharing lessons learned that have implications for refinement of best programmatic practice.

HR and Staff Management

• Promote the growth and development of others in IRC teams and partners: Assess proficiencies; develop and lead targeted learning and training strategy. In particular, coach, mentor and support M&E/MEAL staff, provide vital tools and resources, as well as on the job training;
• In collaboration with technical coordinators and program managers, provide technical supervision to a large sized MEAL team across multiple sectors and geographical areas: set clear performance objectives; inform management of staff work plans; contribute to regular performance reviews; champion a positive working environment for professional development; foster an inclusive and respectful team climate, where all staff are valued and respected and can contribute to their maximum potential;
• Continually assess person-time requirements, support budgeting and resource allocation, and lead the recruitment of country MEAL staff, TTA’s, consultants and, support their onboarding.
• Help to drive a culture of ambitious, responsible, and committed leadership amongst MEAL teams
• Support teams through close attention to staff care, mentoring, and development.
• Create and sustain a work environment of mutual respect where team members strive to achieve excellence.
• Contribute to country team-building efforts, help team members identify problem solving options, and ensure the integration of all team members into relevant decision-making processes.

Qualifications

• University degree (statistics, social science, public health, development economics, or a related discipline);
• Minimum five (5) years of international experience within the development / humanitarian sector, at least 2 of which are at management level preferably in Africa;
• Leadership experience in quality M&E system set-up, maintenance and oversight from inception to close-out that leads to evidence base decision making and strategic planning;
• Proven technical skills in monitoring and evaluation, including experience with multi-sectorial and multi-donor funded programs and experience in statistics, electronic mobile data collection, sampling, evaluation and research methodologies;
• Demonstrated knowledge and experience in setting up or maintaining mechanisms to collect feedback from affected populations;
• Proven abilities in developing monitoring plans, data collection, information management, use of databases, and analysis and performance monitoring;
• Demonstrated ability to train and build capacity of others;
• Comprehensive knowledge of humanitarian accountability principles and their translation into practice;
• Strong planning, organizational and interpersonal skills;
• Excellent analytical, presentation, and reporting skills;
• Excellent database, data management and data analysis skills, with experience using at least 2 software applications such as Microsoft Excel, Access, SPSS, STATA;
• Previous experience with electronic/mobile data collection (ODK, CommCare, CSPRO) and GIS mapping preferred;
• Ability to listen to others and to facilitate discussions with clients from different groups and origins;
• Fluent in written and spoken English and French;
• Strong commitment to IRC’s Vision and mission.

Females candidates are strongly encouraged to apply.

Deadline for applying : 22 August 2022 at 5:00 PM.

All applications must be submitted ONLINE