Location: Maroua, Buea or Yaounde- Cameroon

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:

o    Joining meetings as directed in the Project Cycle Meetings Guidance – participates in every PDM, POM, PIM, and PCM.

o    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.

§  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.