Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning and Accountability (MEAL) Assistant

ORGANIZATIONAL OVERVIEW 

FHI 360 is a nonprofit human development organization dedicated to improving lives in lasting ways by advancing integrated, locally driven solutions. Our staff includes experts in health, education, nutrition, environment, economic development, civil society, gender, youth, research, and technology– creating a unique mix of capabilities to address today’s interrelated development challenges. FHI 360 serves more than 70 countries, all 50 U.S. states, and all U.S. territories. FHI 360’s Crisis Response team has been responding to the humanitarian emergency in Northern Ethiopia through an integrated health, nutrition, WASH, and Protection program to improve the health of the conflict-affected population. Now will expand their reach to Eastern Ethiopia, the Somali Region working with Pastoralist Concern (PC) Organization an Ethiopia-based national organization.

POSITION OVERVIEW  

Under the supervision of the Senior MEAL officer, the MEAL Assistant is responsible to providing technical support on design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation activities for integrated health, nutrition, WASH and protection activities in North Wollo. She/he will work on collecting and putting information into the integrated project MEAL system, ensuring accountability and implementation of core humanitarian standards, engaging with program staff to ensure monitoring reports are completed in an accurate and timely fashion and provide assistance to all FHI 360 technical teams in completing MEAL documentation.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND DELIVERABLES

MEAL System Development and Implementation

• Ensure that MEAL systems and tools are in place and being implemented at the field level and communicate any issues or inefficiencies that arise to the MEAL coordinator in a timely and proactive manner;
• Assist the MEAL team to coordinate and oversee the development and maintenance of appropriate databases to accurately track data collected from various interventions across program activities;
• Participate in the development of project/periodic MEAL plan, consistent with the work plan;
• Support program field staff in the collection of activity- and output-level monitoring data during activity implementation;
• Undertake regular field visits to monitor and supervise project implementation, identify bottlenecks and success stories;
• Conduct data quality assessments in the field, check the quality of the beneficiary data (completeness, reliability, consistency, double counting, etc)coming from the field and initiate corrective actions through routine monitoring;
• Participate in baseline and endline survey studies and any other regular needs assessment which will continually provide information and latest developments;
• Compile, and share monthly narrative updates on the Response Program;
• Collect different reports regularly (monthly, quarterly, and annually) from operational/field locations, check for consistency between the narrative and quantitative parts, compile the quantitative part and make data entry in the Program database.

Accountability and Learning

• Actively promote meaningful community participation and consultation during planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation;
• Work with program teams to ensure that appropriate community feedback mechanisms are functional and accessible, and that feedback and complaints are welcomed and addressed;
• Ensure communities and target beneficiaries know their rights and entitlements, have access to project information, and participate in decisions that affect them;
• Regularly assess the effectiveness of existing complaint outlets and conduct periodic consultation with the community and other partners to decide the appropriate channel together with them;
• Ensure complaints and feedback are collected, recorded in a database, reviewed timely, tracked, and shared with MEAL/Program teams for a timely response; and update the monthly accountability dashboard;
• Assist the MEAL/program team to ensure accountability and learning through planning and facilitating periodic progress reviews (at the activity and output levels) and results-based reviews (at the outcome level);
• Support the effort of documentation and sharing of program results, ensuring sharing of lessons learnt and good practices;
• Strengthen the MEAL documentation system of FHI 360’s program centrally by documenting all MEAL documents at the Country Office.

Technical Support and Capacity Building

• Provide technical guidance to project teams and partners on the development and use of monitoring tools and instruments as well as reporting of program progress; provide technical leadership for all MEAL activities of the project;
• Assist staff members on MEAL issues for better implementation and sharing of good practices;
• Work closely with WASH, health, nutrition and  protection teams;
• Assist the MEAL team to conduct trainings as needed for programs and partner staff on the use of MEAL tools, mobile based data collection tools and feedback and complaints mechanisms.

Others

• Required to adhere to FHI 360’s principles and values;
• Support to ensure protection and gender sensitivity in all program activities;
• Undertake additional tasks assigned by their supervisor.

Job Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Economics, Sociology, Social Work , Public Health, Nutrition, Project Management, M&E or relevant discipline;
• At least two years of proven experience in the Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning, and Accountability of humanitarian or development programs;
• Hands on experience on Microsoft applications, particularly Excel and Word and digital data collection tools and the use of smart devices for data collection;
• Experience with quantitative and qualitative data collection and data management system.
• Previous experience with health, nutrition, protection and WASH programming;
• Good understanding of the UN Cluster System; international and national minimum standards of services in humanitarian settings;
• Driven and able to balance multiple task, commitments, and to work flexibly in a team;
• Passionate about humanitarian work and assistance;
• Strong oral and written communication in English and local language is required.