United Purpose

VACANCY

Programme Quality Assurance and Monitoring and Evaluation Manager (Blantyre or Lilongwe, Malawi-based, with extensive country travel)

Background

United Purpose (UP) Malawi is an international non-governmental organisation working to create opportunities for lasting improvement in peoples’ lives. We work in partnership with others to support a range of livelihoods and food security, WASH and health, sustainable energy and gender equality programmes reaching over 1,200,000 people a year across Malawi. Globally, we work in nine countries across Africa, Asia and South America, however our Malawi programme is by far and away our largest and most established country programme. UP currently operates in 17 districts in Malawi, supporting over 30 on-going projects, with a total staff of over 350.

Thecandidate we are recruiting must be firmly committed to delivering lasting positive improvements to the communities that we serve, and delivering UP’s mission and upholding our values of integrity, dignity, and environmental respect.

Job Purpose: The Programme Quality Assurance & M&E Manager is responsible for providing leadership in establishing and monitoring continuous quality improvement, innovation, and quality assurance processeswithin UP Malawi and its programmes, particularly the FUTURE project[1]and othercurrent or upcoming resilience, agriculture and nutrition projects.

S/he will plan, direct or coordinate quality assurance programmes and formulate in-house quality technical standards, procedures and best practices in consultation within internal and external stakeholders and other benchmarks. S/he will promote the upholding of standards of technical quality, particularly at community and field programme delivery levels (for instance both agronomic, social/participatory approaches) across the country programme. S/he will also be responsible for providing strategic leadership, guidance and capacity for refining, strengthening and implementing a robust monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) system at a country programme level and ensuring the integration and alignment of all programme and project M&E systems to this system. S/he will also coach and build programme quality and MEL capacity throughout the country programme, and ensure mechanisms are in place to share learning internally and externally. This position will report to the Deputy Country Director – Programmes (TBC), with no direct line reports.

Key duties and responsibilities:

  • Define and agree on in-house quality procedures and standards and practical support tools, in line with national and international benchmarks and standards, particularly in terms of agriculture, nutrition, M&E, and potentially other sectors of UP’s expertise - in close consultation with UP staff and wider stakeholders
  • Work with UP teams to ensure standards of quality are being upheld across relevant UP projects particularly at community implementation levels
  • Perform regular on-site quality audits of projects (30-50% of the time is expected to be at field programmes)
  • Act as a catalyst for change and improvement in performance and quality– and promote an organisational culture of quality performance
  • Identify relevant internal capacity building needs to ensure quality performance
  • Support development of new programmes and projects in line with quality standards
  • Provide strategic direction and support on the refinement, improvement and effective roll-out of a country-level monitoring, evaluation and learning system fed in by individual projects, in coordination with programme teams.
  • Monitor quality implementation performance, including ensuring timely data compilation, aggregation and analysis of national MEAL data and integrating into organisational output and impact reporting systems.
  • Coordinate the cross-programme MEAL technical working group, and mentoring appropriate country staff on monitoring, evaluation and learning.
  • Uphold effective implementation of MEAL policies, standards and resources/tools for use by all programmes, in line with international MEAL standards.
  • Provide technical expertise and support to all country programmes and projects, for instance support to design and implementation of baseline and evaluation studies, data collection, analysis, research, and new programme development etc.
  • Coordinate knowledge capture and lessons learning for the country programme, as well as appropriate dissemination (internal and external) – especially leading the write up of the UP Malawi annual impact report. This includes, if appropriate, facilitating learning reviews and document lessons for internal/external sharing and cross-learning.

The successful candidate will have:

  • At least a Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field (natural resources management, social sciences, agriculture, business, community development, nutrition, gender, M&E, organisational learning), while a Master degree would be a distinct advantage.
  • Strong experience of strategic planning and coordinating quality assurance programme and formulating quality control systems.
  • Extensive work experience in areas such as rural development, agriculture, nutrition, M&E, and programme development.
  • Experience of working in Malawi or southern Africa, strongly preferred.
  • Excellent interpersonal, planning, coordination, and facilitation skills.
  • Fluency in spoken and written English, including excellent report writing and data analysis skills - including the ability to synthesise large amounts of disparate data.
  • Strong respect and empathy for rural communities; a deep personal commitment to promoting women’s rights; as well as an affinity to UP’s mission and values of integrity, dignity, and environmental respect.
  • Practical knowledge and experience in use of a wide range of M&E tools including participatory methodologies.
  • The ability to coach others in the operation of programme quality, M&E frameworks, etc
  • Knowledge of the use of statistical packages like SPSS, Excel, ACCESS, R, STATA and NVivo preferred
  • Proactive and highly motivated individual who requires the minimum of supervision.
  • Ability to represent the organisation in a highly professional manner with a range of high level stakeholders.
  • A full clean driving licence and ability to drive a four-wheel drive manual vehicle is essential.

Terms and conditions:

The position will attract a generous benefits package including a competitive salary, housing allowance, medical, insurance, flights, local allowance, dependent’s and school fees allowances (negotiable).

The contract will be for approximately 36 months up until around October 2020 (with strong possibility of future extension, subject to personal performance and funding).

To apply for this position, candidates must submit a completed Application Form. Please note that CVs and cover letters will not be accepted. Please visit download the Application Form, and then submit the completed form via email to .

If you have difficulty accessing the form, then contact us at .

When submitting, please put YOUR NAME_PROGRAMME QUALITY ASSURANCE MANAGER in the email title. Any applications that do not include this in the title will not be considered.

Closing date for the receipt of completed application forms is midnight 3rd December 2017.

Only short listed candidates will be contacted. For more information about UP, please visit our website at UP is an equal opportunity employer, and women are particularly encouraged to apply.

[1]FUTURE is a new €4.5m European Union-funded resilience building project, called FUTURE, targeting 35,000+ most vulnerable households (existing social cash transfer programme (SCTP) beneficiaries) across the three districts of Mulanje, Nsanje and Zomba. The project will work to address the existing food and nutrition security challenges while targeting the most vulnerable households in Malawi. It aims to improve the capacity of households to prepare for, withstand and bounce back during and after shocks, and includes a number of new innovations such as shock-responsive cash transfer top-ups and insurance. Integrated interventions for climate change adaptation and livelihood diversification will be promoted targeting existing Social Cash Transfer Programme (SCTP) beneficiaries. Developing women’s agency and effective gender mainstreaming is a central focus of the project and all interventions are aimed at strengthening women’s economic and social position. Strengthening policy systems and district and community level coordination to enhance social protection and resilience integration will also be key priorities.This new 36-month innovative project is led by UP (overall grant holder and directly implementing in Mulanje district), will be working with our consortium partners Save the Children International (implementing in Zomba district) and Concern Worldwide (implementing in Nsanje and some parts of Mulanje district).