Senior MEL Manager, Coffee Africa - Remote at TechnoServe Kenya

Job Summary:

• The Senior Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Manager, Coffee Africa is tasked with providing leadership across the MEL function for TechnoServe’s Coffee Practice, ensuring the foundational building blocks for managing to impact are in place. The Senior MEL Manager supports innovation in monitoring and evaluation of specific interventions, providing strategic and technical oversight for our coffee practice in Africa. The Senior MEL manager will manage three direct reports. 
• The Senior MEL Manager position requires strong technical MEL expertise, but is also fundamentally a leadership position. Success in the role requires effective communication with senior staff, an ability to build and manage relationships remotely, strong project management skill, and strategic thinking.

Program Overview:

• The Coffee Africa portfolio includes more than 6 programs across Sub-Saharan Africa and Puerto Rico. The programs are large scale with multiple MEL staff across several countries. The position will collaborate closely with Coffee Practice leaders to develop and advance the MEL strategy. The position will also collaborate with the Global Impact team and ensure insights from MEL feed into organizational learning. This position sits within TechnoServe’s Coffee Practice Africa and will report to the Global Coffee Sustainability Director. The position will be Remote (GMT - GMT+3), with East Africa as the preferred location.

Primary Functions & Responsibilities:

Provide leadership within the coffee practice :(40% LOE):

•  Develop standards, best practices, and tools to improve the quality of MEL across the practice. This includes standard indicator guidance, analysis guidelines, database standards, monitoring dashboards, and data collection tools.
•  Facilitate the analysis and dissemination of findings for Coffee Practice and play a leading role in developing a practice area learning agenda.
•  Collaborate with country coffee teams to systematically improve the structures, processes and resources that enable application of good MEL practices, including standardization of tools and technology use,
•  Coordinate the planning of MEL activities, storing of MEL documents, and tracking of MEL deliverables.
•  Manage the hiring process country MEL staff.
•  Manage Regional MEL and PIMA team.
•  Lead Corporate Measurement annual impact reporting from the Africa coffee programs and present the results to the global impact team for review.

Manage the coffee practice digital monitoring system - PIMA:(30% LOE):

• Develop and oversee PIMA strategy (agronomy and wet mil) by adopting appropriate technology, setting goals and priorities and determining actions to achieve specified goals through resource mobilization
• Define strategy to design, test and roll-out new features in the PIMA system to track performance of field teams and the efficiency of program interventions
• Support program teams in adopting PIMA technologies (training, monitor usage etc)
• Create yearly plans aligned with Coffee Practice goals and objectives

Provide direct technical assistance to projects (20% LOE):

• Lead the development, management, analysis, reporting, and sharing across the practice of R&BL assessments.
• Lead the development of Focus Group protocols and trainings
• Lead internal evaluations or special studies; Eg seedling distribution, stumping incentives, cool farm tool, farm inventory survey, living income surveys etc.

Support the management of impact evaluation within the Coffee Practice (10% LOE):

• Assist in selecting the impact evaluation team in line with donor requirements
• Contribute to the design of the impact evaluation by reviewing survey tools and training materials to ensure alignment with project KPIs
• Review deliverables from the impact evaluation team, including regenerative practice assessments, demo plot yield surveys, and annual audit reports

Basic Qualifications:

•  A bachelor’s degree in a relevant field, such as economics, public health, business administration, statistics, evaluation, data science, or other; and a minimum of 10 years of experience designing, managing and implementing multidisciplinary and results-based MEL systems in an international context.
•  Or a master's degree and 7 years of similar experience.
•  Expertise in evaluating projects that are focused on agriculture
•  Experience with project management systems that allow for effectively planning, tracking, and ensuring quality for complex projects.
•  Background in a range of monitoring and evaluation methodologies, including both quantitative and qualitative research approaches
•  Hands-on capacity-building experience, including development of training materials, as well as delivering actual training sessions.
•  Fluent in STATA programming language