Senior Associate, Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (MEL) - Rainforest Alliance

Rainforest Alliance is a legally registered organization in Ghana, with an office in Accra, Kumasi and sub-office in Western Region. Its main activities in Ghana are in the cocoa sector and extend to other agricultural commodities and the broad field of sustainable land management. Rainforest Alliance works across the West Africa region, with field-level activities in Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

For more information, please visit http://www.rainforest-alliance.org/about

Job Description

The Senior Associate, Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (MEL) is responsible for coordinating and carrying out M&E activities in Rainforest Alliance’s Landscapes & Livelihoods projects in Ghana. The Senior Associate M&E will support these projects by working with Rainforest Alliance staff, project partners, consultants and stakeholders to build and manage sound M&E systems that improve understanding of the local context and tracks the project implementations and outcomes of interventions over time.

This includes designing and evaluating the implementation of project 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. The position is open to expand in time and geography depending on funding and development.

• Develop and manage field-based project M&E systems ´ methods, tools and processes, in coordination with the region´s Directors, Project Managers, and RA´s Senior Advisor on Project M&E and Quality Assurance
• Collaborate in the design and conduction of field-based baseline, mid-term, and end of project 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 project´s contribution to such outcomes;
• Design and provide remote and in-country training and technical assistance to staff, project partners, and field consultants on M&E methods, tools and processes, ensuring M&E best practices;
• Lead a participatory process with community members, lead farmers and landscape actors to co-create, and troubleshoot a hybrid community monitoring (HCM) system, including methods, tools and processes, employing GIS and satellite imagery;
• Design and provide support, directly and remotely to actors of landscape governance bodies 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 Project Managers in maintaining updated project information in the Project Management Platform and SharePoint-based project sites;
• Support Project Managers in the preparation of quality and timely project performance technical reports as required by donors, as well as in the preparation of presentations to partners, and other Rainforest Alliance colleagues and departments;
• Ensure that Rainforest Alliance´s Key Performance Indicators are embedded in project design, and M&E best practices into the project;

Required Skills or Experience

• Bachelor’s Degree in international development, Agriculture, Social Sciences, Economics, Natural Resources Management or related field;
• Minimum 5 years of experience in a similar position, including a 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; for example, ArcGIS, QGIS, ERDAS Imagine, Global Mapper, ENVI, STATA, SPSS, KOBO Toolbox, CSPro, R.; and competency in 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, and knowledge of French, a big plus;
• Demonstrated ability to build capacity for project M&E among project staff´, partners and key actors in local communities;
• Experience in West Africa; and ability to travel locally and internationally at least 40% of the time.