Senior Project Officer – Learning, and Context Monitoring | Dire Dawa, Ethiopia

About CRS

Catholic Relief Services is the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. CRS works to save, protect, and transform lives in need in more than 100 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality. CRS’ relief and development work is accomplished through programs of emergency response, HIV, health, agriculture, education, microfinance and peacebuilding.

For nearly 60 years, CRS has taken the lead in responding to natural and man-made disasters affecting Ethiopia’s most vulnerable communities. Moving beyond emergency response, CRS’ disaster mitigation and recovery projects in drought and flood-prone areas have rebuilt individual and community assets through non-food aid in the form of agriculture, livestock, health, nutrition, and water and sanitation assistance. CRS’s humanitarian work in Ethiopia also provides livelihoods support to farmers and entrepreneurs, promotes gender equality, mobilizes for immunization and mitigates the impact of HIV.

As part of CRS family, you will join the more than 5000 strong and vibrant individuals working globally to accomplish the mission of CRS. CRS/Ethiopia invites you, the qualified candidate, to apply for the following position.

Position Title:    Senior Project Officer – Learning, and Context Monitoring

Department:        Programing-RFSA

Duty Station:     CRS Ethiopia/Dire Dawa

Employment Term:   Definite term (i.e. up to June 30, 2026)

Reports To:  Technical Advisor II-Collaboration, Learning, and Adapting

Application Deadline:   March 4, 2023

Job Summary:

As a lead for the RFSA SPO Learning, and Contex Monitoring field based team, you will facilitate achievement of RFSA objectives through coordinating and reporting on all project activities and providing technical guidance and advice to staff and implementing partner(s) advancing Catholic Relief Services’ (CRS) work serving the poor and vulnerable. Your coordination and relationship management skills will ensure that the project for which you are responsible applies best practices and constantly works towards improving the impact of its benefits to those we serve. You will lead the implementation of RFSA’s Learning strategy across RFSA implementation woredas. You will guide the implementation of Ifaa’s Monthly Interval Resilience Analysis (MIRA). This is CRS’ high-frequency context, and resilience monitoring approach and is used for measuring resilience and well-being for stronger food security and resilience programming. MIRA provides short-interval trend data on the shocks that households experienced, the food security and well-being impacts of these shocks, and ultimately, households’ resilience outcomes. You will work with partner and CRS field based staff to ensure that results from CLA and MIRA initiatives are used to improve programing quality and reporting.

 Job Responsibilities:

Collaboration Learning and Adapting

• Manage implementation of project learning and adaptation strategy, system, and tools at field level with a focus on promoting knowledge acquisition, management, documentation, dissemination and learning at multiple levels.
• Help ensure a cross-sectoral approach for integration among the different Ifaa sectors and partners
• Contribute to knowledge management and learning through collecting and analyzing program data. Lead and document active, intentional, and adaptive learning within and across activity interventions, incorporate refinement activities and learning into implementation. Include active, intentional, and adaptive learning within and across interventions
• Ensure that data and experiential learning with a focus on adult needs are consistently applied throughout the activity life cycle. Use evidence, activity data, and active learning to better examine the functions, role and nuance of formal and informal institutions and social dynamics.
• Lead regular Theory of change assessment, review and revision exercises, ensuring that multiple levels of CRS and partner staff engage, contribute to, and understand the Theory of Change and how it guides programming.
• Ensure robust partner engagement and consultative processes with communities, local government, civil society, other donor funded projects, local researchers and academics.
• Contribute to capacity strengthening of project staff and partners through helping develop learning and training strategies and agendas/curriculums, conducting trainings and workshops, and mentoring and coaching to project staff.

Context Monitoring

• Lead preparations for MIRA data collection (qualitative and quantitative) across implementing woredas on a monthly basis. This includes ensuring all enumarators are availebel to collect data, are trained on the data collection processes, and that all data collection is supervised for data quality.
• Lead the dissemination of MIRA data to stakeholders for use. These include woreda, and Zonal Government Disaster Risk Managemet Committees, other GO and NGO forums and to communities using community engagement processes.
• Build capacity of field staff, and communities data management and use of MIRA data for early warning. This includes identifying appropriate stakeholders at community level and working with RFSA’s sector teams identify and address capacity gaps.

General Roles

• Coordinate and oversee working relationships with all local project stakeholders and serve as the liaison between them and the project team to mobilize local actors and promote project activities and impact.
• Supervise and perform ad-hoc inspections of various processes and resources at project sites to ensure timely project activities implementation and adherence to established process standards and procedures. Ensure proper tracking of resource use for project activities through periodic budget reviews and follow-up with and assistance to implementing partner.
• Support and coordinate capacity building and technical support activities to ensure assigned project activities are implemented per project guidelines and standards.
• Ensure project documentation for assigned activities is complete with all required documents and is filed per agency and donor requirements. Assist with preparation of trends analysis reports and documentation of case studies and promising practices.

Typical Background, Experience & Requirements:

Education and Experience

• Bachelor’s Degree required. Degree in International Relations or in the field of managemement, economics, community development, would be a plus.
• Minimum of 2-3 years of work experience in project support, ideally in the field of collaborating, learning, and adapting and for an NGO.
• Experience working with partners, participatory action planning and community engagement.
• Staff supervision experience a plus
• Experience monitoring projects and collecting relevant data.
• Experience using MS Windows and MS Office packages (Excel, Word, PowerPoint).

Personal Skills

• Analysis and problem-solving skills with ability to make sound judgment
• Good relationship management skills and the ability to work closely with local partners

• Proactive, results-oriented and service-oriented
• Attention to details, accuracy and timeliness in executing assigned responsibilities

 Required/Desired Foreign Language: English 

• Proficiency in Amharic, and Afaan Oromo is required.

Travel Required (include percentage of required travel, if applicable)

 Key Working Relationships:

Supervisory: Technical Advisor – Collaboration, Learning and Adapting (CLA)

Internal: COP, DCoP Programming, MEAL, and Youth/Gender, ELRP Technical Managers, RFSA MEAL Team.

External:  Implementing partner organizations, Government staff managing early warning and resilience programmes, other organizations working in food security and resilience.

Agency-wide Competencies (for all CRS Staff):

These are rooted in the mission, values, and guiding principles of CRS and used by each staff member to fulfill his or her responsibilities and achieve the desired results.

·       Serves with Integrity

·       Models Stewardship

·       Cultivates Constructive Relationships

·       Promotes Learning

Disclaimer:  This job description is not an exhaustive list of the skill, effort, duties, and responsibilities associated with the position.