Technical Director/Monthly Interval Resilience Analysis (MIRA) Lead

Note: This position is proposal-based, and contingent upon funding

About CRS

Catholic Relief Services is the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. CRS works to save, protect, and transform lives in need in more than 100 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality. CRS’ relief and development work is accomplished through programs of emergency response, HIV, health, agriculture, education, microfinance and peacebuilding.

Job Summary

Provide technical leadership for the development and implementation of an evidenced-based approach to strengthen the food security and resilience of 13,000 rural families in Honduras and Guatemala through the proposed Pathways to Resilience project, a three-year, $12 million effort. Pathways to Resilience is a two-country project that aims to help farmers and communities build resilient agricultural production, participate profitably in markets, and work together to address local development priorities. MIRA is CRS’ recurrent resilience monitoring approach and is used for measuring resilience and well-being for stronger CRS food security and resilience programming. The approach was designed to provide near real-time data on shocks, resilience, food security, and well-being in place of other, typically annual methods of tracking resilience. Pathways to Resilience is CRS’ Latin America and Caribbean Regional Office flagship project to combine Water Smart Agriculture, Market Systems Development, and MIRA as an evidence-based model for building resilience in rural Central America.

The Technical Director/MIRA Lead will work in close partnership with the Project Director and project teams in both countries to design and implement a complementary Water Smart Agriculture (WSA) and MIRA Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) system for Pathways to Resilience that uses robust scientific design, community-based enumerators, and both scientific analysis and machine learning to produce timely demographic, food security, and resilience data for adaptive project management, community capacity strengthening, and engagement with both public and private sector key actors.

You will cooperate with CRS global and regional technical advisors to lead design, train field staff and community enumerators, implement and continuously improve the system, design dynamic and purpose-tailored data visualization aids (e.g. dashboards), and use the data produced to advise project implementation, produce project reports and information briefs, and to communicate key information, messages, and learning in easily understood formats to a multi-level audience from the communities themselves, to project staff, government officials, peer agencies, other WSA-implementing countries, and donors, among others.

You will provide technical assistance in line with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) program quality principles and standards, donor guidelines, and industry best practices to the project team and CRS country and regional leadership to advance the delivery of high-quality programming to the poor and vulnerable. Your technical knowledge, advice and guidance will contribute to the effectiveness, adaptive capacity and innovation leadership of the Pathways to Resilience Project.

Roles and Key Responsibilities

• Work in partnership with the Project Director to provide technical solutions to the Pathways to Resilience project teams, remotely and on-site, for project planning and how to best apply program design and implementation standards, best practices, partnership principles, tools, and M&E, ensuring consistency across two countries and high-quality implementation for building resilience.
• Lead design, development and implementation of the MIRA/MEAL system by project MEAL staff in close collaboration with global and regional advisors, HQ ICT machine learning experts, and the Pathways to Resilience project team.
• Build the capacity of Pathways to Resilience project management teams in Guatemala and Honduras to work with and build the capacity of community enumerators to collect, understand and communicate MIRA and other project data in ways that are easily accessible to community members, and to build the capacity of community members to understand, analyze and use the MIRA data to plan, access resources, and implement priority community development initiatives that strengthen resilience.
• Provide ongoing mentorship and backstopping for project staff and enumeration teams to ensure high quality and efficient data collection.
• Ensure regular and proactive communication and coordination with country program teams and the Project Director, facilitating regular discussions of data, results, and field performance.
• Provide technical leadership for research and analytics activities, including design of sampling frameworks and digital survey tools and collaboration with CRS Data Scientists to link survey tools with machine learning models and easily understandable data visualization dashboards.
• In coordination with the Project Director, provide ongoing support and contribute to CRS and partner staff capacity strengthening in Resilience and related project approaches, including Water Smart Agriculture, Savings and Internal Lending Communities (SILC), business and entrepreneurship training, and collective action through helping develop learning and training strategies and agendas/curriculums, conducting trainings and workshops, and mentoring and coaching.
• Contribute to knowledge management and learning through collecting and analyzing project data, measuring program impact, capturing, sharing lessons learned and best practices, and developing research and internal reports.
• Participate in and contribute to CRS global MIRA meetings, events and learning efforts.
• Establish and maintain relationships with peer organizations, research and other institutions and participate in both internal and external forums sharing project learning and promoting CRS’ contributions to resilience in rural Guatemala and Honduras.
• Collaborate with technical WSA teams in El Salvador and Nicaragua – in response to opportunities to build and grow capacity across the region based on real-time lessons from Pathways to Resilience in Guatemala and Honduras.

Basic Qualifications

• Master of Science Degree in the field of agriculture, watershed management, resilience, food security, or related field required.
• Minimum of five years relevant international working experience in an advisory or management role with progressive responsibilities, ideally with an international NGO, with minimum of three years working for programming interventions in resilience or related programming.
• Previous experience doing research and providing technical assistance and training in rural communities in Central America is required.
• Demonstrated application of technical principles and concepts in resilience, food security and regenerative or climate-smart agriculture. General knowledge of other related disciplines to ensure proper cross-sectoral approach.
• Demonstrated advanced proficiency in technical and report writing.
• Experience in mentoring, coaching, facilitation and training applying adult learning principles and practices.
• Experience with program monitoring and evaluation, including research design, applying data collection tools and methodologies, data analysis, and data visualization and presentation.
• Experience and skills in networking and relations with donors, peer organizations, and faith-based and civil society partners. Understanding of partnership principles.
• Proficient in MS Office packages (Excel, Word, PowerPoint), CommCare, Web Conferencing Applications, information and budget management systems, knowledge-sharing networks.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Excellent relationship management skills with ability to influence and get buy-in from people not under direct supervision and to work in partnership with project management and field teams in diverse geographical and cultural settings.
• Strong strategic, analytical, problem-solving and systems thinking skills with capacity to see the big picture and ability to make sound judgment.
• Strong oral communication skills in English and in Spanish.
• Strong writing skills in Spanish, and in English preferred.
• Strong presentation, facilitation, training, mentoring, and coaching skills.
• Proactive, resourceful and results oriented.

Required Languages – Fluency in English and Spanish required.

Travel – Must be willing and able to travel up to 40% in Honduras, Guatemala and other countries in the region as required by the project or the agency.

Key Working Relationships:

Supervisory Responsibilities: none

Internal: Regional Water Smart Agriculture Research and Science Advisor, Project Director, Project Coordinators, Head of Programs in Guatemala and Honduras, MIRA/MEAL Coordinators, HQ Data Scientist, HQ MIRA Scaling Lead, WSA platform.

External: Directors and Coordinators of partners and allies of the project, technical staff of partner organizations, government officials, municipal authorities, staff of NGOs related to CRS and donors.