M&E Advisor, Education

NB: This role can be based in Amman, Jordan. Applicants from other IRC registered locations will considered, provided applicants have the right to work there.

The IRC delivers education programs in 22 countries reaching nearly 1.5 million children around the world. The IRC’s educational interventions strive to help children and youth gain valuable skills and knowledge that will increase their opportunities and life chances, and contribute to their well-being and livelihood. The IRC supports formal and non-formal learning activities that lead to tangible learning outcomes in literacy, numeracy, socio-emotional learning, and marketable skills and promotes the protection and psychosocial well-being of conflict-affected children and youth.

Job Overview/Summary

The Education M&E Advisor will strengthen skills and systems needed for IRC’s education technical unit and field teams to collect and use education M&E data to inform design, continuous quality improvement and course correction. This position will also be responsible for advancing our work with IRC’s Measurement Technical Unit in developing one to two measurement tool kits to support country programs to collect routine data on a few prioritized education program indicators; as well as to work with IRC’s Airbel Impact Lab to develop two case country studies that demonstrate good practice and lessons learned on the use of data to inform course correction, client responsiveness, and continuous quality improvement. The Advisor will report into the Senior Technical Advisor for Education (STA).

Responsibilities

M&E strategy and systems

• Work with the STA, Education Technical Advisors (TAs), measurement team members, and selected country programs to assess education M&E, data, systems, and skills, and develop and implement a plan to strengthen foundational M&E and data management in education across IRC country programs, through a combination of direct support and capacity-building (see following section);

• Work with the STA and Education TAs to design use cases for program and implementation data – identify the most important strategic and implementation decisions that require program data;

• Identify incentives, skills, structures, and systems required to collect, store, analyze and visualize program and implementation data;

• With field staff and technical unit team members, develop simple, user-friendly tools to collect, store, analyze and visualize data;

• Support routine, organization-wide M&E workstreams such as regular updates to Theories of Change, core indicators, and IT system roll-outs;

• Participate in improving internal processes to strengthen data capture and management.

Capacity-building and learning

• Develop and roll out tools to strengthen the capacity of field staff to be able to collect and use data for ongoing decision-making in their programs, including tool adaptation and contextualization;

• Increase data savvy among the Education TAs through continuous capacity-building, including webinars, and production of related training materials as needed, on topics prioritized collaboratively with education technical unit colleagues;

• Support program staff to design, implement, update and deploy data dashboards, in alignment with broader IRC approaches to data visualization and sector-wide best practice;

• Work with the Education and Technology TA and Education TAs, as well as the IRC Measurement Technical Unit to create one to two measurement tool kits to support program staff in routine data collection on core education indicators and establish shared practices and standards across IRC education programs; identify needs for additional tools and toolkits collaboratively and proactively pursue additional opportunities for improvement;

• Develop case country studies that demonstrate good practice and lessons learned on the use of data to inform course correction and continuous quality improvement, and share lessons learned with other stakeholders and country teams;

• Interface with the IRC’s Measurement Unit and relevant working groups to learn from other sectors’ challenges and success in this space, and expand and promote conversations to share learning within the education TU and across country teams ;

Key Working Relationships:

• Position Reports to: Senior Technical Advisor, Education

• Position directly supervises No current direct reports, potential for supervision of consultants, specialists, or officers as work evolves.

• Indirect Reporting: N/A

• Internal: position works closely with the Measurement Technical Unit, Senior Researcher, Education; Education Technical Unit; and education country teams

• External: New York University – research partners

Position Requirements

• Advanced degree in a relevant field such as economics, statistics, international development / public policy, or other social sciences

• Technical understanding of education in humanitarian response contexts strongly preferred

• Experience (at least 5 years) designing, developing, and rolling out education M&E tools and systems, through both hands-on work and supporting others

• Experience developing data systems and working with education-related data sets to enable use of data by front line educators, education program managers and education leaders

• Experience analyzing and presenting data, and developing or managing the systems to do this, in simple ways to enable use of data for decision-making

• Experience working with and building the capacity of individuals from a wide range of countries, cultures and with a range of expertise related to M&E and data collection, analysis and use, both in-person and remotely

• Experience with mobile data collection and analysis tools especially ODK-based applications (Kobo, Ona, Formhub, Commcare, etc.)

• Experience with data analysis/visualization software (PowerBI, Tableau), GIS, R, STATA, or SPSS

• Familiarity with use and analysis of common international M&E tools for education (e.g. EGRA/EGMA) preferred

• Fluency in written and spoken English is required; proficiency in French, Spanish, and/or Arabic is preferred

• Strong organizational skills: the ability to work independently and productively in a fast-paced environment

• Flexible work attitude: the ability to work productively in a team and multi-sectoral environment & independently

Working Environment:

• Standard office work environment

• Travel required (up to 40%)

The IRC and IRC workers must adhere to the values and principles outlined in IRC Way – Standards for Professional Conduct. These are Integrity, Equality, Service, and Accountability. In accordance with these values, the IRC operates and enforces policies on Beneficiary Protection from Exploitation and Abuse, Child Safeguarding, Anti Workplace Harassment, Fiscal Integrity, and Anti-Retaliation.