Background:

The International Rescue Committee, one of the world’s largest humanitarian international NGOs, provides relief, rehabilitation and development support to vulnerable people and communities over 30 countries. We began work in Ethiopia in 2000 in response to severe drought in Ethiopia’s Somali region and are currently providing assistance to Ethiopians and refugees in six regions in Ethiopia, implementing emergency and development programs in health, water and sanitation, economic recovery, and development (ERD), women’s protection and empowerment, education, child protection, and multi-sectoral emergency response.

Position overview

The MEAL Assistant will be jointly supervised, under a Management in Partnership arrangement by the Addis based PlayMatters MEAL Manager and the field-based M&E Officer. One of the key focuses of the MEAL Assistant will be the PlayMatters project, an initiative to increase play-based learning opportunities for nearly 1 million pre-primary and primary school aged refugee and host community children impacted. In relation to Playmatters, the MEAL Assistant will be responsible for routine monitoring of the project, digital data collection, quality assurance, design and implementation of key M&E tools and establishment of client feedback channels. The MEAL Assistant will also be responsible for recording and monitoring feedback, and for ensuring that the loop is closed, and clients are informed of decisions taken.

Specific Responsibilities:

Monitoring and Evaluation

• Collect data and routinely monitor project implementation
• Pilot and support in the contextualization of data collection tools
• Pilot and prototype contents to adopt learning through Play approach.
• Assist in mapping pilot location and select settlement, recruit respondents for the behavioral mapping.
• Train staff and local officials in the correct use of digital data collection tools.
• Ensure data quality of routine monitoring and evaluation data.
• Support local management teams with ad-hoc data requests and analysis
• Present statistics on monitoring data in clear formats to highlight feedback trends to the program team, as well as synthesize qualitative feedback in ways which provide the detail that the program team will need to design an appropriate response.
• Analyze key themes, challenges, and opportunities for program improvement.
• Support and train enumerators or data collectors as needed.

Feedback Planning and Implementation

• Work with the MEAL Officer and other MEAL Assistants to collect client feedback through various channels that IRC installs including Hotline, community meetings, surveys, discussions,, suggestion boxes, SMS among others
• Support the MEAL officer in updating the Feedback Registry and to raise cases of concern, including request for addition information on program, complains related to programs and breaches of IRC code of conduct.
• Collect response from the program staff on the feedback and communicate back to client
• Work with other MEAL Assistant and the MEAL officer in the field office to analyze and compile feedback and complaints
• Collect feedbacks on use of developed contents to adopt learn through Play.

Other

• Provide support to the M&E Officer to conduct ongoing monitoring and evaluation activities.
• Other duties as assigned by the Management In Partnership team to enable and develop IRC programs

• 2 years of experience with Diploma and 0 years of experience for degree holders in social science and other relevant field of studies
• Analyze and communicate data in a way that facilitates effective decision making
• Experience with digital data collection tools and the use of smart devices for data collection
• Proactively engage with clients, local officials and community members, acting as a community liaison focal point
• Driven and able to balance multiple task, commitments, and to work flexibly in a team
• Creativity, curiosity and enthusiasm, and the ability to develop and test new ways of working and solutions to problems
• Strong oral and written communications in English, Amharic and local language is required.

Desirable:

• Experience with M&E for Education programming in a refugee context.
• Written and verbal communication in English is an added advantage.
• Passionate about humanitarian work and assistance!