Monitoring Advisor, A360 at Population Services International (PSI)

Based in Nairobi, Kenya
Up to 25% international travel
Reports to A360 Project Director with a dotted line to the Digital Health and Monitoring Team
* Candidates must have authorization to work in Kenya. PSI will not sponsor work visas.

PSI’s flagship adolescent program, Adolescents 360 (A360) is recruiting new talent to support the next phase of the project. With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, A360 has partnered with young people and government health systems to design, pilot and scale adolescent sexual and reproductive health (ASRH) interventions which position contraception as a tool to achieving girls’ self-defined goals. It operates across Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania. During the first phase of the project A360 supported over 420,000 adolescent girls adopt modern contraception.

A360 has now embarked on an ambitious new phase which will focus on: i) strengthening the existing interventions; ii) supporting host government to adopt A360’s approaches; and iii)
generating evidence, learning and global goods to support the adoption and replication of A360-inspired approaches by others.
The Monitoring Advisor will play a pivotal role in this new phase. They will lead A360’s efforts to define measures of success, understand who we are reaching, grow the culture of using routine monitoring data to continuously improve, and demonstrate accountability to our stakeholders. Sound like you? Read on.

Your contribution

• Strategic planning
• Lead the development / revision of A360’s theories of change, results framework, and monitoring systems – in close collaboration with A360’s technical advisors and leadership.
• Lead the development and implementation of A360’s global monitoring plan and support country monitoring leads to develop country workplans.
• Be the ‘knowledge holder’ for A360’s M&E systems and the enabling environment that they are implemented within:
  • Support country-level mapping of government health management information systems (HMIS). To the extent possible, ensure A360 prioritizes data available in HMIS instead of layering parallel monitoring systems on top.
  • Understand broader PSI country office monitoring systems and support A360 country teams to capitalize on opportunities for alignment.
  • Create opportunities to leverage the evidence base – for example to align with globally accepted indicators (MEASURE Evaluation and others).
• Capacity strengthening
• Support hiring (as necessary), supervision, and capacity strengthening for A360 country monitoring leads.
• Provide opportunities for cross-country learning within the M&E portfolio – including routing peer to peer data quality audits (DQAs) and regular cross-country M&E check-ins.
• Strengthen program culture to emphasize quality data use – integration of M&E and program and a rigorous approach to interrogating data for program improvement.
• Partner with PSI departments to improve processes, data analysis and integrity, management information systems (MIS), and other initiatives.
• Develop and contribute to relevant knowledge products such as technical briefs on ASRH monitoring indicators and costing analysis.
• Data analytics and use
• Lead the Data2Action agenda within A360.
• Work with A360 country teams to ensure data is reported up in a timely manner and partner with A360 global and country teams to conduct monthly performance reviews.
• Support preparation of A360 donor deliverables which include analysis of program data.
• Collaborate with A360’s Senior Technical Advisor for Research and Learning and A360’s evaluation and learning partner to triangulate and reconcile routine monitoring data and research findings.
• Support A360’s Senior Technical Advisor for Research and Learning in implementation of data-focused research activities such as client exit interviews (CEIs).
• Work with A360’s country teams and A360’s technical partner Avenir to generate bi-annual costing analysis.
• Data privacy and integrity
• Support A360’s country teams to set up, maintain and where necessary improve the digitization of data collection, warehousing and analytics.
• Ensure data storage and sharing are compliant with the data protection policies of host governments, donors and PSI.
• Ensure A360’s country monitoring leads plan and execute bi-annual data quality audits in collaboration with host governments.
• Conduct annual internal data quality audits of each country during country visits.
• Facilitate data quality audit debriefs and action planning exercises.

Essential

• 5-10 years of experience in monitoring roles within the health sector.
• Client-focused team player; Sara is our focus, there’s no room for egos.
• Excellent qualitative and quantitative research and analytical skills.
• Proven experience of developing robust theories of change and results frameworks.
• Strong understanding of national health management information systems (ideally experience in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya, and/or Tanzania).
• Strong understanding of FP2030, PMA and DHS data relating to SRH.
• Practical experience of using data management, analysis, and visualization software such as DHIS2, STATA, and PowerBI.
• Ability to interpret data and explain findings to non-technical audiences.
• Proven experience mentoring teams and developing their technical capacity.
• Excellent written and verbal English and inter-personal communication skills.
• Excellent data visualization skills.
• Strong emotional intelligence.
• Attention to detail and completer-finisher mentality.
• Pragmatic and proactive when faced with challenges.
• Confident in your own abilities but collaborative, humble and self-aware.
• Calm under pressure and a clear thinker in the face of complexity.
• Master’s degree in a related field (public health, research, development, etc.).
• Intrinsically motivated to work in this sector and passionate about adolescent SRH.

Desirable

• Experience working on multi-country projects.
• Experience engaging beneficiaries such as youth in monitoring and evaluation.
• Familiarity with human centred design.
• Experience of working on health system strengthening and institutionalisation projects.

Values

The candidate we hire will embody PSI’s corporate values:
Measurement: You use hard evidence to make decisions and guide your work. You set clear goalposts in advance and explain clearly if you need to move them.
Pragmatism: You’ll strive to deliver the best possible result with the resources available. You won’t be paralyzed by a need to make things perfect.
Honesty: You own your mistakes and are open about your shortcomings – it’s the only way you’ll learn and improve.
Collaboration: You’ll quickly establish a mental map of whom you can rely on for what, on your team, at headquarters, and in our country offices – if you try to do it all yourself, you won’t succeed.
Trust: You accept limits to your sphere of control and give colleagues the benefit of the doubt
Commitment: You are in it for the long-haul and want to grow with the organization, just like PSI serves its consumers and partners with host-country governments through thick and thin