Head, Impact & Evaluation at Africa Enterprise Challenge Fund (AECF)

Key responsibilities

Strategic leadership and direction:

• Lead on delivering an ambitious results and impact measurement, knowledge and learning framework, and strategy, specifically, but not limited to developing results frameworks and plans for data capture, analysis, and dissemination of results in order to facilitate learning and evoke the desired response from stakeholders.
• Lead the development and implementation of appropriate ex ante impact evaluation frameworks that support investment appraisal, including potential returns on investments, based on both primary and secondary evidence.
• Lead the development and implementation of appropriate ex-post impact evaluation frameworks for harvesting the diversity and magnitude of the AECF’s investments.

Portfolio management: 

• Support AECF’s Management Team in the development and active use of a portfolio-wide results framework and monitoring dashboard to help ensure good management and delivery of AECF’s programmes and policy work. This should include generating evidence to demonstrate the outcomes and impacts of AECF programmes, and ensuring this knowledge is well communicated and applied to support programme scale-up/down, replication of achievements, and drive innovation.
• Ensure that evaluations across the AECF are well-designed, managed, and communicated. This will involve close collaboration with the Portfolio Team to help them envision and embed creative impact measurement methods into the solutions they deliver to our partners across the concept note, design, competition, and implementation phases.

Capability building: 

• Strengthen the capacity and skills of the team in results and evaluation, and continue to build a culture of managing for impact across the institution. This will include providing results and evaluation training to staff, identifying external training opportunities, supporting selected staff to apply for evaluation accreditation, and providing ongoing capacity building through technical assistance at the programme level.

Corporate reporting and communication:

• Lead on AECF corporate results monitoring and reporting, supporting evidence uptake, communicating monitoring and evaluation findings, translating and using the results to influence programme and policy decisions.

Strategic partnerships and collaborations:

• Collaborate with various key partners to raise the visibility of our work, with special attention to promoting our breakthroughs in result measurement and impact evaluation.
• Understanding the processes, institutions, and organizations that shape the changing international development context in which AECF operates, including the Sustainable Development Goals, legislation and government structures, and the roles of multilateral organizations and processes in development

Requirements:

• A Master’s degree in International Development, Economics, Mathematics, Communications, or a related field
• A minimum of 10 years of full-time work experience in research, impact measurement, and evaluation, preferably inan  international development context, working with SMEs and applying DCED standards
• Strong technical skills across results and evaluation, and ability to use and advise on different data collection and evaluation approaches and methods; ability to demonstrate thought leadership on technical monitoring and evaluation issues
• Background in statistics to ensure technical inputs into relevant programmes and help develop the institution-wide evidence base
• Ability to independently prioritize and manage a diverse workload and manage multiple concurrent workstreams
• Excellent communication and writing skills, with a keen ability to synthesize and present complex data in a simple, compelling, meaningful way (ability to produce beautiful and top-notch data visualization is a plus)
• Confidence in working and engaging externally with the results and evaluation community, donors, the private sector, and Development Finance Institutions
• Ability to facilitate the process of turning impact data into meaningful stories
• Experience of working in developing countries is desirable