Senior Associate, Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning at Rainforest Alliance

Position summary:

At the Rainforest Alliance, we are looking for a collaborative and results oriented Senior Associate, Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (MEL). The Senior Associate M&E is responsible for coordinating and carrying out a LandScale-based Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) and Performance Management Framework and activities in Rainforest Alliance’s Mount Kenya Sustainable Landscape and Livelihoods Program in Kenya. The Senior Associate M&E will lead the Mount Kenya Sustainable Landscape and Livelihoods Program by working with Rainforest Alliance staff, project consortium partners, consultants, and stakeholders to build, manage and incorporate a multi-stakeholder LandScale tool, a framework outlining core environmental and social dimensions of sustainability in landscapes and providing environmental, social, and economic indicators to measure sustainability.

  This role will include designing and evaluating implementation of program activities; training technical staff, project partners, and field consultants on M&E methods and tools; ensuring proper output and outcome indicator data collection, quality control, analysis, and management; and reporting on key findings. The position will also coordinate closely with other Rainforest Alliance units.

This role also includes supporting Landscape Management Bodies in rolling out and implementing LandScale-based, context adjusted systems to monitor their landscape´s performance. It will involve a Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) system for the Action, while ensuring coordination of concerted efforts to build evidence and knowledge sharing across several landscapes.

Responsibilities:  

• The Rainforest Alliance’s Core Values are Impact, Change, Collaboration, Openness and Trust and as such they form the basis of the behaviours we demonstrate;
• Develop the program´s MEL Plan, including tools, processes, and responsibilities to track program progress, assess its achievements, address challenges and risks, and documents its lessons learned, in consultation with MEL expert, and Team Manager;
• In coordination with the Team Manager, technically supports a participatory process in Landscape Governance Bodies leading to the design and implementation by the program’s Landscape Governance Bodies of context-specific, Landscale-based M&E systems (including methods, tools and processes, employing GIS and satellite imagery) in each of the program´s target landscapes;
• Designs and provides support, directly and remotely to actors of landscape governance bodies on M&E methods, tools and processes, ensuring M&E best practices;
• Collaborate with the Team Manager in the design and conduction of field-based baseline, mid-term, and end of program studies to understand needs, gaps, and opportunities for achieving rural development outcomes in the context of business and local community needs, and to assess the program´s contribution to such outcomes; and
• Design and provide remote and person-to-person training and technical assistance to staff, program partners, and field consultants on M&E methods, tools and processes, ensuring M&E best practices;
• Implement and take responsibility for quality control procedures to ensure transparent, evidence-based M&E systems, based on reliable and timely field data collection, management and analysis, to generate and report high-quality output and outcome indicator values;
• Support the Program Managers in maintaining updated program information in the Project Management Platform and SharePoint-based project sites;
• Support Program Managers in the preparation of quality and timely program performance technical reports as required by donors, as well as in the preparation of presentations to partners, and other Rainforest Alliance colleagues and departments; and
• Ensure that Rainforest Alliance´s Key Performance Indicators are embedded in program design; and M&E best practices into the program.

Qualifications: 

• Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Resource Economics, Statistics, Social Economics, Agricultural Economics, Natural Resources Management or related field;
• Demonstrated ability (5 years) in similar position, including minimum of 2 years of experience conducting project M&E activities including as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) officer for designing, delivery and impact assessments of programs and projects, and/or related studies;
• Experience in software programs including ArcGIS, QGIS, ERDAS Imagine, Global Mapper, ENVI, STATA, SPSS, KOBO Toolbox, CSPro, R. and computer Microsoft Office (Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Publisher);
• Has hands-on experience in co-designing and implementation of cost-effective performance-based and community-based monitoring systems, and the collection, management, analysis and reporting of high-quality output and outcome indicator data; 
• Experience advising and supervising field teams or consultants in the collection of field data on social, environmental and/or agronomic and/or socioeconomic indicators for performance assessment, and in the use of associated field methods and tools (household surveys, farm monitoring, etc.);
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills; with required fluency in English. Fluency in Swahili is a plus;
• Demonstrated ability to build capacity for Program M&E among staff, partners and key actors in local communities;
• Ability to travel locally and internationally at least 40% of the time.