Senior M&E Associate / M&E Coordinator - Innovations for Poverty Action

Innovations for Poverty Action seeks a Senior Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Associate or M&E Coordinator to join our growing M&E advisory team, called the Right Fit Evidence Unit, and provide technical support to governments and nonprofits on the development of strong and adaptive Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning approaches.

This position is based in Accra, Ghana, and will report primarily to an Engagement Manager from the Right-Fit Evidence Unit (based outside of Ghana), and will receive additional support and oversight from IPA Ghana’s Policy Manager (based in Accra, Ghana). The Senior Associate/Coordinator will be the primary on-the-ground staff member delivering M&E technical support to enable data-driven design and iterative adaptation from the part of our partners. Initially, the Senior Associate/Coordinator is expected to spend a majority of their time on an advisory engagement supporting an education nonprofit, as well as the Ghana Education Service, who are both close partners of IPA, on their MEL and piloting approaches related to pre-primary education interventions. We expect that the Senior Associate/Coordinator will also get involved in other Right-Fit Evidence advisory engagements over time.

Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is a global research and policy nonprofit that discovers and promotes effective solutions to global poverty problems. As its core business, IPA brings together researchers and decision-makers to design, rigorously evaluate, and refine these solutions and their applications, ensuring that the evidence created is used to improve the lives of the world’s poor. IPA has conducted hundreds of randomized evaluations across sectors, learning both whether programs work, and how they can work better.

Complementing this core business, the Right-Fit Evidence Unit at IPA is a new effort aimed at helping organizations build strong and tailored Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) practices, which balance the need for information on impact with operational data to support management decisions. In close collaboration with IPA’s sector programs and country office teams worldwide, the unit provides consulting and direct services to implementers, donors, and governments, with the goal of helping them figure out what reliable data and evidence to gather, how to do it in a cost-effective way, and how to make the promise of data-informed programmatic decisions a reality.

Responsibilities

As a member of the Right Fit Evidence Unit, the Senior Associate/Coordinator will provide technical support throughout M&E advisory engagements, from the workshops or training to one-on-one coaching for in-country development organizations’ staff.

Supported by an Engagement Manager and other Right-Fit Evidence Unit team members and Ghana office staff members, the Senior Associate/Coordinator will:

• Advise clients in crafting their learning strategies, in preparing their Monitoring and Evaluation agendas, in developing evaluation plans for their programs, etc.
• Advise clients to identify their principal goals, help them to craft theories of change and M&E plans for these programs, and find areas where they can improve their existing M&E operations and learning routines.
• Work individually with staff from these programs to prepare monitoring and evaluation plans and assessments to define their evaluation objectives, questions, methodologies, milestones, resources required, risks, and other important information.
• Form long-term relationships between IPA and the implementing staff of the programs, with the broader aim of strengthening the M&E culture in these organizations.

Days will rarely look the same. The job will involve anything from report-writing to workshop-leading to answering a question for new M&E staff.

Qualifications

Required qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree in economics, public policy, social science, or a related field
• 2-5 years of relevant work experience, including experience in M&E (public sector) or organizational performance/R&D/operational research (private sector) or experience in management consulting or other professional services
• Superior analytical and conceptual thinking skills
• Familiarity with statistics and data analysis (including advanced Excel)
• Ability to present information in a structured and insightful way, both in writing and orally
• Self-starter, entrepreneurial mindset, versatility and willingness to learn.
• Passion for making data-driven decision making a reality in the development sector.

Preferred additional qualifications 

• Master’s degree in economics, public policy, social science, or a related field
• Experience in management consulting or other professional services
• Demonstrated ability to coach and train others in MEL methodologies or data analysis
• Experience with programs relating to education or early childhood development
• Experience working in developing countries
• Familiarity with the concepts surrounding the Theory of Change and the core tools of MEL (both quantitative and qualitative research methods)
• Familiarity with SurveyCTO, Open Data Kit, Kobo or similar survey software
• Ability to use Stata, R or similar statistical software