Title: Story Telling Officer

Location: Baidoa, Somalia

Position Status: Full-time, Regular

About Mercy Corps

Mercy Corps is powered by the belief that a better world is possible. To do this, we know our teams do their best work when they are diverse, and every team member feels that they belong. We welcome diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and skills so that we can be stronger and have long term impact.

Program/Department Summary

Mercy Corps has been operating in Somalia since 2005. With a staff of around 100 people and programs operating throughout the country, Mercy Corps’ overall country goal is building a peaceful and prosperous Somalia where all people feel secure, are economically empowered, and are meaningfully engaged. Mercy Corps’ current portfolio in Somalia focuses on humanitarian response and resilience; inclusive economic growth; enhancing trust and accountability between communities and their government; and improving youth livelihood and education opportunities. All Mercy Corps interventions in Somalia are implemented in a conflict and gender sensitive manner.

Mercy Corps is seeking a Research Coordinator in the five-year USAID-funded Somalia Resilience Population Measurement (RPM) Activity.

RPM aims to develop and lead a resilience measurement system on the collective resilience outcomes at a population level and build the capacity of participating stakeholders to estimate individual contributions to collective resilience outcomes. The program will establish a common measurement and analytics process among diverse actors in Somalia to link single-program-focused resilience capacity measurement methodologies previously piloted in Somalia and advance analytics to link diverse stakeholder-level contributions to collective, population-level resilience outcomes. The goal of RPM is to inform and improve stakeholder activities that contribute to resilience capacities that matter most for populations in the target zone. This will be achieved through two objectives: 1) Participating stakeholders have the ability to estimate individual contributions to collective resilience capacities, and 2) Population level change in resilience is assessed through an innovative mixed methods measurement system.

Position Summary

The Story Telling and Learning Officer is primarily responsible for implementing the production, dissemination, and uptake of learning products, particularly supporting qualitative story development in support of Objective 1. Essentially, this will entail planning, implementation and co-ordination of tasks relating to the documentation of compelling stories to influence decision making. In addition, the Storytelling and Learning Officer will work closely with the Strategic Communication for Learning Manager to support other related activities under Objective 1 and to increase participating stakeholders’ capacities to simplify evidence emerging from  resilience measurement activities.

Essential Responsibilities

PROGRAM AND COMMUNICATION

• Support production, dissemination, and uptake of learning products, for qualitative story production.
• Organize logistics for learning events/sessions
• Document compelling stories utilizing evidence from resilience measurements surveys
• Participate in resilience learning journey cross-training session
• Work closely with recruited Short Term Technical Assignments g., community youth reporters, media firms and journalists
• Develop storyboards for the development of effective and appropriate story assets (text, images, audio, video)
• Cultivate close-working relationships with Community Youth Reporters to develop strategic resilience stories
• Facilitate capacity building sessions for Community Youth Reporters.
• Determine and execute cross-promotional opportunities including the development and sharing of messaging toolkits and promo campaigns
• Support collection of qualitative data for panel and recurrent monitoring surveys
• As assigned by the supervisor, perform other tasks, which are consistent with the expertise needed in this role

SECURITY

• Work closely with the country team’s security focal point to develop and maintain systems that promote the safety and security of all team members.
• Ensure that activities are designed and implemented with a clear analysis and understanding of security.

ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING

• As part of our commitment to organizational learning and in support of our understanding that learning organizations are more effective, efficient and relevant to the communities they serve, we expect all team members to commit 5% of their time to learning activities that benefit Mercy Corps as well as themselves.

ACCOUNTABILITY TO PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS

• Mercy Corps team members are expected to support all efforts toward accountability, specifically to our beneficiaries and to international standards guiding international relief and development work, while actively engaging beneficiary communities as equal partners in the design, monitoring and evaluation of our field projects.

Accountability

Reports Directly To:  Strategic Communication for Learning Manager

Works Directly With: RMEL Specialist, Deputy chief Party, Director of Research, Chief of Party, & other members of the RPM Applied Learning team as well as Short-Term Technical Assistants, Somalia MEL, and Mercy Corps HQ research and technical support team members.