Humanitarian MEAL Advisor at Save the Children

ROLE PURPOSE:

• In this critical role, the postholder supports Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL) for humanitarian programs in the East and Southern Africa (ESA) region. As part of the ESA Regional Office (ESARO) team, they will lead MEAL systems and processes, and enhance capacity strengthening in SCI Country Offices. A key focus is to develop a strong evidence base for child focused humanitarian programmes and enhance response quality
• The role involves supporting ESA humanitarian programs with data analysis, indicator measurement, Feedback and Reporting Mechanisms, MEAL-related donor deliverables and set up processes and standardisation to benchmark the quality of humanitarian response and programmes. Collaboration with the Centre Humanitarian Evidence and Learning team is essential to contribute to global learning and strengthen regional MEAL approaches.
• In humanitarian settings, the postholder will adapt to changing needs, working flexibly to ensure effective crisis response and be comfortable working in a cross functional way. This position is pivotal in enhancing programme improvements, learning, and technology use in MEAL, ensuring high standards of accountability and efficacy in the region.

KEY AREAS OF ACCOUNTABILITY:

• In the dynamic and diverse context of the East and Southern Africa (ESA) region, this role is central to enhancing our humanitarian response and impact. The following key accountabilities outline the critical functions of the position, focusing on strengthening Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL) systems, ensuring compliance with donor requirements, fostering programme learning and innovation, and actively contributing to evidence generation and use. This role is instrumental in driving our commitment to accountability and continuous improvement, ensuring that our programmes not only meet the immediate needs of children and communities but also link to long-term, sustainable change.

Support ESA Humanitarian Response MEAL Systems and Processes:

• Act as the MEAL Technical Support Lead for responses in ESA,
• Support COs in designing and contextualising SC Rapid and detailed Needs Assessment tools ensuring assessment findings include an analysis of children's needs.
• Collaborate with regional and country office humanitarian teams in ESA to develop and enhance MEAL emergency preparedness, anticipatory action and response, integrating them within existing country MEAL frameworks and Save the Children Humanitarian Plan, and adhering to the Core Humanitarian Standards, Sphere Standards and Humanitarian Principles.
• Provide targeted MEAL support to multi-sectoral humanitarian programmes across the ESA region. Build upon and enhance existing Country Office MEAL systems to more efficiently optimise resources.
• Assist programmes and technical staff in selecting indicators and setting realistic targets to measure programme progress and achievements.
• Support the use and roll out of SCI approved systems such as PMM PRIME, KoBo Toolbox, IMPACT, Performance Monitoring Tool (PMT), and CommCare to make good use of data for decision making.
• Conduct data quality assessments and MEAL system reviews, collate trends and suggest system improvements.
• Ensure children's consultations are integral to all humanitarian responses, co-leading interagency children's consultations for major response levels in the ESA region. Manage globally held strategic funds for E&L, ensuring alignment with broader humanitarian reform initiatives.

Award Support and Donor Reporting and Compliance

• Provide guidance during the design and execution of MEAL activities including baselines, endlines and evaluations where required.
• Ensure programme compliance with donor requirements including USAID's Open Data Policy, BHA monitoring and evaluation policies, BPRM M&E requirements and UN agency M&E requirements.
• Contribute to streamlined MEAL approaches across Awards to enhance Country Office MEAL resourcing and systems.
• Contribute to developing strong evidence for donor reports ensuring data quality and advanced analysis.

Proposal Development and Technical Leadership:

• Provide MEAL technical support for project/programme design and humanitarian response planning in the ESA region.
• Finalise MEAL plans, Logframes, and indicator selection for proposals incorporating donor required and Save the Children Global Indicators in collaboration with Country Office teams.
• Ensure adequate resourcing of MEAL to deliver on key MEAL activities and capacity enhancement of response and partner MEAL teams.

Strategic Engagement and Advocacy:

• Represent Save the Children in strategic regional forums.
• Utilise the global and regional organisation's position to promote change in the policy and external discussions using child-related evidence.
• Act as a strategic influencer with relevant stakeholders, championing children's voices in advocacy and influencing.

Decision-making Support:

• Provide critical information to managers and senior managers for accurate decision-making.
• Set up a system and a way to standardise response review and provide recommendations for action.

Capacity Strengthening:

• Ensure each Country Office and Response have a MEAL Capacity Strengthening Plan which outline team and partner technical capacity development priorities.
• Work closely with the One Humanitarian Evidence & Learning Team to coordinate and provide appropriate capacity strengthening support to individuals and teams.

Programme Learning, Evaluations and Innovation:

• Lead the filling of evidence gaps using learning agendas developed by programmes and seek strategic funding opportunities.
• Support COs in the use of the Humanitarian Evaluation & Synthesis guidance to optimise project evaluations and contribute to the measurement of project contributions to the Save the Children Humanitarian Plan (SCHP) and response plans.
• Leads development of Regional Evidence and Learning-related communication documents; (case studies, regional/global newsletters, including SCI ImpactBox, Global MEAL Newsletter etc.) for use by senior managers, donors, and external partners.

Save the Children Movement- Facing:

• Contribute to and encourage country office participation in the Global Humanitarian E&L Community of Practice.
• Actively engage with the One Humanitarian E&L Team and relevant E&L Technical Working Groups (TWGs).
• Facilitate the smooth submission of country SCHP indicator reporting on a bi-annual basis.

BEHAVIOURS (Values in Practice)
Accountability:

• Holds self-accountable for making decisions, managing resources efficiently, achieving and role modelling Save the Children values
• holds the team and partners accountable to deliver on their responsibilities - giving them the freedom to deliver in the best way they see fit, providing the necessary development to improve performance and applying appropriate consequences when results are not achieved.

Ambition:

• sets ambitious and challenging goals for themselves and their team, takes responsibility for their own personal development and encourages their team to do the same
• widely shares their personal vision for Save the Children, engages and motivates others
• future orientated, thinks strategically and on a global scale.

Collaboration:

• builds and maintains effective relationships, with their team, colleagues, Members and external partners and supporters
• values diversity, sees it as a source of competitive strength
• approachable, good listener, easy to talk to.

Creativity:

• develops and encourages new and innovative solutions willing to take disciplined risks.

Integrity:

• honest, encourages openness and transparency; demonstrates highest levels of integrity

QUALIFICATIONS

• Minimum of a Bachelor Degree or equivalent experience, plus at least 8 years of relevant experience
• Professional proficiency in MS Office suite
• Professional proficiency in spoken and written English

EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS
Essential

• Experience working in a humanitarian response setting.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate and collaborate effectively with individuals and teams at all levels, both internally and externally.
• Demonstrated experience related to M&E and research, specifically with awards funded by USAID BHA (formerly FFP and OFDA), BPRM, FCDO, and/or UN agencies.
• Demonstrated experience designing or managing logical/results frameworks, M&E plans, accountability mechanisms, and programme evaluations.
• Demonstrated experience developing and tracking programme indicator performance and developing donor reports for emergency programmes.
• Proven experience designing and conducting quantitative and qualitative studies data analysis and interpreting results, and experience using statistical software and data visualization tools.
• Proven ability to successfully work under tight deadlines, manage multiple tasks simultaneously, and work both independently and as part of multicultural teams.
• Willingness and ability to travel internationally up to 30% of the time, including to emergency contexts.
• Experience developing and conducting training programmes for field staff including curriculum design, presentation and teaching skills, and training-of-trainers methods.
• Excellent analytical skills, with theability to closely analyze data andevidence, to identify trends, draw out implications, and make recommendations for improvement to key processes.
• Able to work with and analyselarge volumes of incomplete datafrom disparate sources and identify trends and patterns.
• Ability to extrapolate data to predicttrends over time.
• Outstanding attention to detail. Abilityto assess dataconfidence level and adjust approach to analysis based on the quality of the data.
• Experience improving data quality overtime through continuous improvement.

Desirable

• Creative with strong datavisualization skills. Demonstrable experience of usingdata visualization tools effectively, including Power BI.
• Strong knowledge of SQL andrelational databases.

Additional job responsibilities

• The duties and responsibilities as set out above are not exhaustive and the role holder may be required to carry out additional duties within reasonableness of their level of skills and experience.
• The post holderis required to travel internationally from time to time.