About Mercy Corps
Mercy Corps is a leading global organization powered by the belief that a better world is possible.
In disaster, in hardship, in more than 40 countries around the world, we partner to put bold solutions
into action — helping people triumph over adversity and build stronger communities from within.
Now, and for the future.
Program / Department Summary
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, and its influence spreads across the continent. Yet, inequality and insecurity have consistently undermined Nigeria’s development. Mercy Corps Nigeria was established in 2012 to respond to these challenges. The Nigeria team is headquartered in Abuja, in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), with offices throughout Nigeria. With a strong and growing team of over 200 staff, Mercy Corps is currently serving over 600,000 beneficiaries across the country with programming in Lagos in the South; Kaduna, Benue, Nasarawa and Plateau in the Middle Belt; Kano in the North; and Gombe and Borno in the Northeast. Programs include girls’ education and financial inclusion, community peace-building, market-based livelihoods and a multi-sector humanitarian response. With the vision of a Nigeria in which all people are empowered, engaged, resilient and secure, Mercy Corps Nigeria focuses on the root causes of conflict, governance, humanitarian needs, and market systems development.
General Position Summary
Mercy Corps is seeking candidates for a MEL Officer who will manage and lead the MEL component of an expected five-year USAID-supported Community Initiatives to Promote Peace (CIPP) Program in Nigeria. The MEL Officer provides strategic guidance, vision and management for successful monitoring and evaluation of the program. This individual also supervises MEL staff and ensures the
strategic and functional integration of all MEL activities as well as active collaboration with subawardees and USAID. The Officer oversees all MEL activities, provides technical direction and
support, and ensures the accurate reporting of results for program activities. The Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Officer is an important position in the Mercy Corps Nigeria program responsible for contributing to strategy discussions, providing technical assistance on M&E on the program and developing successful mechanisms for learning. The Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Manager will be responsible for cross-cutting programmatic information management, monitoring and evaluation, ensuring that information collected is reflected upon, used to improve the program, and is incorporated into consistently high quality reports.
Essential Job Responsibilities
TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP
- Provide leadership, training and mentoring in the development of M&E Plans, M&E tools, survey design, methodology, data analysis, and other skills required for assessing the impact of the program.
- Lead and/or collaborate with external evaluators on the design and roll out of the program baseline and evaluations, while setting up effective systems for learning.
- Ensures programs use the necessary M&E systems and tools, to inform and improve the program, as well as feed into the broader country-level M&E system and country strategy.
- Take the lead in aligning, collecting and reporting on relevant indicators to the organizational-wide M&E systems, and other external systems as relevant.
- Support teams in collecting sex and age disaggregated data and using gender sensitive data collection methods in order to understand and respond to program results with diverse participants.
- Participates in the facilitation of country and sector-level strategic planning sessions, assisting program managers and senior management in the development of their annual plans.
INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
- Works with the program and M&E teams to adopt a holistic program-level M&E system that harnesses open-source software and flexible cloud solutions to more accurately collect, monitor and verify program activities and ensure they are aligned with country strategic and annual plan.
- Provides guidance, recommendations, and leadership to ensure that the M&E systems meet the needs of Programs Managers and Country Leadership and help address shortfalls in M&E and data management that affect program implementation.
- Contributes to program design to ensure adherence to Mercy Corps’ M&E best practices, including the use of standardized indicators, form templates, and documentation methodologies.
- Maintain a comprehensive schedule of funding reports for the program and reviews the program reports to ensure that reports contain accurate, clear, and high-quality data and presented in the proper format.
- Develop program and operational reporting templates that facilitate the acquisition, aggregation and flow of information in programs.
CAPACITY BUILDING AND MENTORING
- Develops and oversees implementation of the M&E staff and partner capacity building strategy that promotes a culture of learning through systematic analysis and reflection of program data.
- Build the capacity of all relevant team members to develop and maintain an excellent M&E system, including regular reflection and analysis of program monitoring data.
- Work closely with Program Managers, Human Resources and Finance to ensure that M&E skills are incorporated into all program position descriptions and positions are budgeted for.
- Contributes to the knowledge management repository with best practices in M&E and ensure that it is accessible to all staff and partners.
- Create and sustain a work environment of mutual respect where team members strive to achieve excellence.
INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL COORDINATION
- Active contributor and collaborator with regional and global counterparts to promote the use of M&E best practices.
- Strengthen linkages with other internal resources, including the LMS, Digital Library, Hub, and Connect, to enhance organizational learning where relevant to M&E.
- Maintain close working relationships with M&E counterparts in other relevant actors and counterparts in Nigeria.
ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING
- As part of our commitment to organizational learning and in support of our understanding that learning organizations are more effective, efficient and relevant to the communities they serve – we expect all team members to commit 5% of their time to learning activities that benefit Mercy Corps as well as themselves.
ACCOUNTABILITY TO BENEFICIARIES
- Mercy Corps team members are expected to support all efforts toward accountability, specifically
to our beneficiaries and to international standards guiding international relief and development work, while actively engaging beneficiary communities as equal partners in the design, monitoring and evaluation of our field projects.
Supervisory Responsibility: MEL team members
Accountability
Reports Directly To: Deputy Chief of Party
Works Directly With: Program Sector Managers, Program Managers, Reporting & Communications Officers, Country Director, Finance, and Operations teams. Coordinates with HQ Program Performance team and the Technical Support Unit.
Knowledge and Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in any the following or related fields: social science, international development, evaluation research, statistics, or economics. Postgraduate degree preferred.
- At least 5 years of progressively responsible experience in designing, managing
- and implementing results-based MEL activities, in emergency and development programming with the proven use of program technology.
- Progressively responsible experience in monitoring and evaluation of conflict mitigation,
preventing violent extremism and/or democracy and governance programs, including
working with development agencies and organizations, government officials, civil society
leaders, community leaders, program beneficiaries and program staff.
- Experience with theoretical and practical background in M&E and skilled in participatory qualitative and quantitative M&E methodologies and techniques.
- Excellent quantitative skills and power user with Excel; Experience with CommCare or other ODK-based mobile data collection platforms preferred; Experience with Access, and statistical packages including Stata, R or SPSS and GIS tools like QGIS, ArcGIS or Google Earth Pro is preferred.
- Experience with data management including the ability to structure and collate data sets for ease of analysis. Demonstrated understanding of intermediate statistics and ability to summarize and make predictions from multiple data sets.
- Extensive knowledge of reporting procedures, best practices, guidelines, and tools for
- monitoring, evaluation and learning, including impact evaluation.
- Demonstrated supervisory skills, and ability to work well on a team.
- Experience in resilience measurement efforts preferred.
- Experience of working on USAID programs preferred
- Previous experience living and working in challenging or insecure environments.
- Nigeria/West Africa experience preferred.
- Fluency in spoken and written English required.
- Knowledge of local dialects is preferred.
Success Factors:
A successful candidate will have a demonstrated ability to lead and communicate effectively with team members of varied work styles and cultures, follow procedures, and meet deadlines with flexibility and creativity in planning and problem solving. S/he will have a proven ability to learn quickly, multi-task, prioritize, take initiative, and be accountable for results, understand the larger picture while remaining focused on the details, problem solving, work within a complex and sensitive setting and to follow laws and security protocols. The most successful Mercy Corps team members have a strong commitment to teamwork and accountability, thrive in evolving and changing environments and make effective written and verbal communication a priority in all situations.
Living /Environmental Conditions:
The position is based in the capital city Abuja with regular travel to other parts of Nigeria. The location is accompanied and generally secure. Housing, health care, water, electricity and consumer goods are all reasonably accessible and there are good international and domestic travel options from Abuja Airport. Air travel is necessary to get to some field locations. Mobile phones services are widely available. Internet is available in all Mercy Corps offices with some inconsistencies in the most remote sites. There is a wide variety of schools with different education philosophies and curriculum (British, American, French, and German to name the few). This position requires 40% travel by road and air to field offices that are located in highly insecure locations.
Mercy Corps team members represent the agency both during and outside work hours when deployed in a field posting or on a short term assignments. Team members are expected to conduct themselves in a professional manner and respect local laws, customs and Mercy Corps’ policies, procedures, and values at all times and in all in-country venues.
Fostering a diverse and open workplace is an important part of Mercy Corps’ vision. Mercy Corps is an Equal Opportunity Employer regardless of background. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment.
