Senior Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Advisor Seas of Change Strategic Partnership

We are currently looking for a
Senior Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Advisor Seas of Change Strategic Partnership
Full-time – The Hague or alternatively Kampala, Nairobi, Kigali or Addis Ababa
Reporting to Strategic Partnership Programme Coordinator

Are you a forward thinking and insights driven MEL Advisor, who enjoys leading evidence generation and connected story telling across countries in support of the strategic partnership program to unluck a movement that creates impactful outcome? Then this is your role!

Context of the position
SNV and partners aim to transform the agri-food system in Eastern Africa promoting and implementing Regenerative Agriculture (RA) and Productive Use of Renewable Energy (PURE). Although examples of success (and failures) in RA and PURE are emerging, these are isolated and limited in scale and therefore function as islands of change. These successes (and failures) must be captured, documented, and shared for broader adoption to achieve Seas of Change.

The Seas of Change (SoC) strategic partnership aims to utilise the learnings and evidence built with, in particular, smallholder farmers and small and medium-sized enterprises – to adopt regenerative practices powered by renewable energy. To reach this ambitious goal we seek to build a network of like-minded partners at national, regional, and global level to institutionalize these ways of working and further embed them in policies and practices of government, private sector, knowledge institutes, and civil society. We will actively engage private actors, public actors, and donors to co-invest €55 million to secure this transformation. The strategic partnership includes a portfolio of SoC country programmes in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda. 

The programmes will have three intervention pathways of LEARN: Practice-based learning and evidence, LINK: Action-oriented collaboration among system actors and LEVERAGE: Embedding ways of working in policies and practices. Through these pathways, the strategic partnership seeks to facilitate a new way of working to achieve an integrated, sustainable and resilient agri-food system powered by renewable energy.

Your role
SNV is seeking an experienced and inspiring Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) Advisor. In this pivotal role you will ensure consistency and quality in the data collected and the tools used for programme level reporting. In doing so, you will work closely with in-country programme MEL officers. Your key contribution is to generate evidence and understanding on the programmes contribution to (potential) changes in systems dynamics of the combination of Regenerative Agriculture and Productive Use of Renewable Energy is delivering on impact within the East-Africa region.

You will lead the organisation of annual ToC and MEL Framework reflection workshops, globally and in-country, with support of the Knowledge and Learning Advisor and the wider MEL team in the programme. Moreover, you will lead a developmental evaluation assessing how the program is leveraged within SNV.

In this role, you will lead and amplify MEL strategies based on the ToC and ongoing findings. Reporting to the Strategic Partnership Lead, you will join a dynamic team of three advisors and a Finance Officer a thriving in multicultural settings. You will collaborate closely with the Seas of Change programme teams in Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Rwanda, as well as other SNV colleagues globally and locally, to integrate MEL insights into knowledge products, advocacy, and programme development. Your leadership and expertise will be crucial in driving the success of our initiatives and ensuring impactful outcomes.

All Strategic Partnership team members will:

• Ensure alignment with the program’s Theory of Change and RA-PURE objectives.
• Build in-country team and partner capacity.
• Drive strategic positioning and advocacy.
• Use digital tools to streamline their work

Your key responsibilities include:

• Data monitoring and analysis at Strategic Partnership level: Lead on the development of the program level MEL framework. Ensuring the program level learning questions are being answered and tracking progress towards program level indicators of success. Lead in the compilation and analysis of all Strategic Partnership outcome and impact data to produce annual data-driven reports submitted to funder and for external-facing documentation. This also includes coordinating the review of ToCs for alignment or adaptation based on emerging realities.
• Innovative MEL methods: co-create innovative MEL methods to measure systems transformation and the impact of a RA/PURE nexus approach. The MEL Advisor will lead on the design of such MEL methodologies and will coordinate, and where needed coach, the country level MEL officers to collect and analyse data with these methods and ensure they are aligned to quality standards. The MEL Advisor also leads on the developmental evaluation – the evaluation of how SNV is leveraging the Seas of Change programme to internally spread systems thinking and ways of working.
• Enable learning to feed adaptive management: In coordination with the KM&L Advisor organise regular Pause and Reflect sessions (or similar critical reflection processes) with country teams and the strategic partnership team. Support the K&L Advisor with extracting overarching learnings and recommendations for adaptation. MEL Advisor will also enable capacity building with and for country leads and Country MEL officers on Strategic Partnership MEL methodologies.
• Business development: Supports Strategic Partnership proposal development efforts by helping design and write high-quality ToCs that align with overall programme framework and approach.
• Positioning: Support the production of high-quality documents for external publication by providing relevant support evidence and data, as well as strategic reflections.