Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, Research, and Learning (MEARL) Manager

VSO is the world’s leading international organisation working through volunteers to create a fair world for everyone. We focus on people who are marginalised or excluded, including those living in poverty, people with disabilities or illness, and those facing discrimination, violence, disasters, disease, and conflict.

VSO places these individuals at the centre of its work as primary actors and agents of change. We work with communities to identify their priorities, opportunities, and solutions, supporting locally led and sustainable change.

Our Approach

VSO’s Volunteering for Development (VfD) approach supports vulnerable and marginalised people to claim their rights and drive lasting change. It addresses the root causes of vulnerability and marginalisation through three core approaches: social inclusion and gender, social accountability, and resilience. These approaches underpin our work in inclusive education, health, resilient livelihoods and peace building.

About the Job

VSO is a lead implementer of the Internship Opportunities for Young Women program (iWork), financed by the Mastercard Foundation. The program will be implemented in Ethiopia across Amhara, Oromia, and Harari regional states, as well as the Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa city administrations. iWork aims to create internship opportunities for 24,000 financially disadvantaged young people, with a primary focus on young women. The program also promotes inclusion by reaching persons with disabilities, refugees, internally displaced people, and returnees. Through internships, iWork aims to help young women build the skills and experience they need to access dignified and fulfilling work, contributing to poverty reduction and an improved quality of life.

VSO Ethiopia is recruiting Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, Research, and Learning (MEARL) Manager for iWork program.

Role Purpose:

Develop and manage the consortium Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) framework for the i-Work Program, ensuring alignment with the program’s Theory of Change and VSO’s Measuring Impact for Learning and Empowerment (MILE) approach. Work with consortium teams to establish and maintain a robust system and process for monitoring, evidence generation, learning and reporting, to inform strategic planning, adaptive management and continuous programme improvement, ensuring consistency, quality standards and donor requirements.

Tasks Responsibilities

• Lead development, implementation and review of MERL framework in line with the VSO Global MERL Guides, Tools & Processes and Measuring Impact for Learning and Empowerment (MILE) approach.
• Plan for the project baselines, mid-term, and end-term evaluations to ensure quality standards and deadlines are met.
• Strengthen accountability and evidence-informed decision-making by maintaining robust monitoring systems, consolidating and analysing partner MEARL data, and leading timely donor reporting on programme performance, results and learning.
• Lead outcome measurement, impact verification and special studies, including baseline, midline, endline and tracer studies, to assess progress, generate evidence and inform programme adaptation.
• Ensure data quality, accountability and donor compliance, establish feedback loop mechanisms, field verification, data audits, data protection and adherence to donor standards and reporting timelines.
• Facilitate reflection sessions and learning forums to translate performance data into actionable insights for adaptive management, training improvement and placement strategies.
• Design and manage a bottom-up, evidence-based reporting pyramid that synchronises data management. Ensure that the planned outputs and outcomes of the project have a robust, periodic documentation and used as part of donor as well as quarterly organisational reporting.
• Carry out regular clusters’ visits for spot checks of MEL activities and the MILE process in the entire project and take risk mitigation measures.
• Lead on dissemination of learnings and share data and evidence in relevant donor/partner/network forums for the purpose of scaling.
• Provide capacity building in MILE, primary actor accountability and quality MERL tools and methods. Ensure that the planned project outputs and outcomes in the form of data and evidence are monitoring by primary actors through functional ‘Learning Circles’ as defined in the project MEL plan and as per the MILE steps.
• Manage consortium MEL team in alignment with people policies and practices; provide coaching, mentoring, team development and well-being support, enhance team performance, engagement, collaboration, and people experience.

Work Location: Addis Ababa with frequent field travel to cluster office of Consortium Projects

Required Qualification

Education

• Master’s degree or equivalent knowledge and skills in Monitoring and Evaluation, Statistics, Economics, Development Studies, Social Sciences, Public Policy, Data Science, Research Methods, Project Management, or related fields.
• Additional certification in Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, Learning (MERL), data analysis, project management, or results-based management is an added advantage.

Required Experience

• Substantial progressive professional experience in monitoring, evaluation, accountability, research, and learning within donor-funded development programs.
• Demonstrated experience leading and managing MEARL systems for large-scale, multi-partner, or consortium projects.
• Strong experience in quantitative and qualitative data collection, analysis, reporting, and evidence generation.
• Experience managing baseline studies, assessments, evaluations, research initiatives, and learning processes.
• Advance skills in Monitoring, Evaluation,
  Accountability, Research & Learnings, with knowledge of MERL tools and proven track record of using participatory methods.
• Experience of developing and delivering high quality MERL plans for a large-scale project multi-partner, or consortium projects.
• Advance data management, complex analysis, and synthetisation skills using SPSS, EPI-Info and other packages; qualitative data analysis tools/software.
• Good engagement and partnership skills with ability to coordinate with government institutions, development partners, research institutions, and consortium members.
• Knowledge of youth employment, internship system, workforce development and youth economic participation with understanding of gender, social inclusion, safeguarding and youth-centred programming.
• Demonstrated feminist leadership, people management, coaching, mentoring and facilitation skills with intercultural competence.
• Good written and verbal communication skills in English and local languages (Knowledge of Amharic language), with report-writing, presentation and facilitation skills.
• Demonstrated VSO Behavioural Competencies.
• Commitment to VSO’s vision, mission, values, code of conduct, people-first principles, volunteering for development approach.

Travel Requirement

Ability to travel including work away from the home base for up to 40% of time to project field locations, woredas and stakeholder sites.