MERL ADVISOR - CRISIS SETTINGS

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.

The MERL Advisor for Crisis Settings in the Health Equity and Rights (HER) unit will provide leadership and technical direction for monitoring, evaluation, research and learning (MERL) in the MOMENTUM - Fragile States program led by IMA World Health. This position will focus on areas of health system and population health resilience and fragility analytics for MOMENTUM’s MERL initiatives aligned with efforts in the preparedness, response and recovery phases of a crisis, shock, or disaster event. S/he will support design and implementation of project MERL strategy for data utilization and quality improvement for reproductive, maternal, newborn, child health (RMNCH) in crisis settings.

Building on CARE’s expertise in program quality in nexus programming, this position will focus on setting up systems and tool approaches to be mainstreamed across countries (government: both health and disaster management counterparts, non-state actors including local partners). The adaptive approaches are to ensure program quality from the beginning of emergency response, provide support from data for decision-making, and follow support to strengthen programming. This position will facilitate thought leadership on translating and elevating data on nexus programming to contribute to the evidence base on SRHR and WASH in crisis settings.

This position will be employed by CARE and will sit at MOMENTUM - Fragile States office with the IMA-led team of Momentum partners. S/He will report to the MOMENTUM - Fragile States MERL Director and will coordinate his/her work with other MERL team members. The strategy will be informed by CARE, IMA, and USAID protocols and standards and by global best practices and innovations.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and manage primarily monitoring and evaluation protocols in addition to research and learning
• Work with field support activities/projects to strengthen their MERL approaches and systems
• Oversee the development and implementation of MEL systems that include timely, accurate, and complete reporting and other mechanisms to deliver relevant data to the relevant stakeholders at multiple levels
• With the MERL team, identify learning agenda and needed information to address the learning agenda, through quality monitoring, evaluation, and research data, and across partners and stakeholders, to ensure methodological rigor or data quality
• Perform other duties as assigned

Qualifications:

• Master’s in Public Health or related degree
• 7-10 years of significant, direct programming experience in global public health in crisis-affected settings (humanitarian response, fragile states, etc.) and familiarity with related global standards and approaches (MISP, Sphere standards, etc.)
• 1 - 2 years of proven experience in monitoring and evaluation in maternal, newborn, and child health, reproductive health, or a related field in a humanitarian context
• Quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis management skills, specifically with database management (preferably in DHIS2), survey instrument development (preferably in KoboToolbox or ODK), and survey implementation
• Demonstrated success in developing and leading gender-transformative MERL strategy to guide large program delivery
• Demonstrated competence to assess priorities, develop M&E plans, articulate research questions and manage a variety of activities in a time-sensitive environment and meet deadlines with attention to detail and quality
• Detailed oriented and critical analysis skills particularly in data interpretation
• Competence in qualitative and quantitative analysis software programs (SPSS, SAS, Nvivo, MaxQDA, etc.) and approaches to routine monitoring for program improvement, evaluation design and household survey sampling methods (LQAS, 30-cluster)
• Technical writing skills
• Adept at achieving results in diverse team and in context of multiple stakeholders with complex relationships
• Strong verbal and written English language skills
• Advanced proficiency in French and/or Arabic strongly preferred