Data Management Advisor: Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH)

This position is contingent upon funding.

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people to survive and rebuild their lives. The IRC has been working with communities in Ethiopia since 2000, providing greater access to water and sanitation, improving hygiene, and developing sustainable livelihoods for victims of drought and conflict-affected communities.

Position Summary:

The IRC is seeking a Data Management Advisor (DMA) for an anticipated USAID-funded Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) project in Ethiopia, which will focus on WASH interventions for enhanced resilience, including a natural resource management (NRM) component. The DMA will support government and academic institutions to establish permanent, publicly accessible data repositories that will strengthen decision-making and good governance on water resources management. Working in coordination with complementary programs and relevant stakeholders, the DMA will improve the technical capacity of local government and the private sector to manage, monitor and evaluate the region’s water resource systems.

Specific DMA responsibilities include the following:

• Develop and implement a comprehensive plan to build the technical and managerial capacity of government institutions at various levels and community water institutions to improve the planning and management of water resources and services.
• Support appropriate government partners to develop a web-based hydrologic and agro tracking system for use by scientists, engineers, resource managers, and policy makers throughout Ethiopia.
• Support appropriate government partners to establish, operate and sustainably maintain a hydrologic data management system, analytical tools for computing and analyzing hydrologic and meteorological data, and a web-based access system.
• Provide training on the setup, operation, and maintenance of the data management system and provide continuing technical support for government partners.
• Incorporate into the database management system real-time data transmitted from stream gauging, water quality, and agro-meteorological stations located throughout the country and any available historic data to support informed decision-making and good governance.  
• Maintain effective relationships with other USAID implementing partners and appropriate government offices to lead the overall development, management and use of the water resources data management systems.
• Establish and run a monitoring and evaluation system including data collection, analysis and reporting to support sound management of the project interventions.
• Facilitate broader learning among development sector stakeholders by leading the production of best practices, lessons learned, success stories and other documentation.  

Required Skills:

• Demonstrated experience managing similarly complex data systems involving multi-million dollar portfolios and coordination with multiple programs and partner institutions.
• Technical proficiency in developing and managing web-based tracking systems.
• Demonstrated knowledge of training and capacity building best practices, specifically in IT and database management.
• Demonstrated experience in the development of monitoring and evaluation systems, and in data collection and analysis.
• Demonstrated ability to quickly assess priorities and effectively manage a variety of activities at a time while paying appropriate attention to detail.
• Excellent interpersonal skills and ability to interact professionally with donor, project stakeholders, in-country collaborators and staff at all levels of the organization
• Strong MS Office skills, including Word and Excel.
• Strong written and oral presentation skills in English.

Experience/Qualifications

• At a minimum: MSc Degree in Information Communication Technology (ICT), economics, or related field, or demonstrated equivalent work experience in the field.

• A minimum of five (5) years of progressively responsible work experience with government, private, or non-governmental organizations (NGO) on database establishment and management, training technicians in database management and the establishment of monitoring and evaluation systems.
• Experience in the development sector, particularly in conflict prone and pastoralist areas.
• Experience with USAID M&E approaches preferred.

• Experience implementing in Africa required; experience in Ethiopia preferred.
• Fluency in English.