MONITORING, EVALUATION AND LEARNING (MEL) ASSOCIATE

Direct report: Venture Development Lead

Duty station: Kampala (with constant travel)

About Outbox

At Outbox, our mission is to bring together the infrastructure, people, knowledge and capital that supports entrepreneurs through the growth of inclusive communities that foster talent and create value where we operate. We take a deliberate approach to how we support Small and Growing businesses, by differentiating our programs based on their unique needs, walking the lonely entrepreneurship journey with them, and capturing our learnings for the benefit of the next entrepreneur we might meet.

We have the best learning communities in the startup ecosystem in Uganda and utilize that competency to distribute our expertise beyond our walls. We strongly believe in the potential of technology to provide an unfair advantage to any business when used for good, and as such focus on supporting digital entrepreneurs first.

Over the last eight (8) years, we have brought together the best people, companies, development partners, Government and knowledge (best practice) for our entrepreneurs to succeed – which is why we believe we are best placed to guide our ecosystem forward. Various partners have trusted us to lead our ecosystem and enabled us to continue our work of ensuring that every young person in Uganda has an opportunity to have dignified work.

Role

As a MEL associate, you are responsible for defining our MSME entrepreneurship programming success metrics, the collection of the data to support the evaluation of progress and the development of our learning agenda. You will work closely with the Venture Development lead to define tools for data collection and assessment.

The primary emphasis of the role is to provide strategic and technical leadership to our MSME entrepreneurship programmes in monitoring, evaluation and learning including reporting of results, data utilisation for program decision making and knowledge management. You will be expected to extend our mandate to the businesses we support as a means of tracking our impact beyond our direct activities.

Core Responsibilities

• Coordinate and work with other staff to manage a robust M&E system, identify and monitor key programme activities in order to document results and what interventions contributed to the results, and ensure their integration into our entrepreneurship programming;
• Lead in ongoing review and implementation of the activity'’s monitoring, evaluation and learning plan to ensure responsiveness to evolving projects, donors, and other partner needs;
• On a regular basis, prepare and ensure timely submission of programme performance monitoring plans, including defining programme indicators and sources of data, as well as contributing to annual work plans -- weekly, quarterly and annual reports & other project documents;
• Track programme monitoring indicators for component activities and periodically provide data to senior management team and partners;
• Document progress on various levels of indicators attributable to programme indicators;
• Direct and ensure coordination and linking of data reporting with technical strategy discussions;
• Develop and manage a dynamic learning agenda on a frequent and regular basis.
• Manage various project databases to capture relevant data on key indicators
• Participate in writing regular, timely progress reports of programme and project activities and results for Outbox and its partners, including to requests for data and reporting in a timely manner;
• Engage with other programme and technical staff in developing and implementing annual programme and project work plans

Job qualifications

Minimum qualifications

• A Master’s degree in statistics or another relevant field;
• At-least 5 years work experience in leading M&E processes, quality improvement and knowledge management. Experience in supporting enterprise business development activities.
• Experience with using modern digital tools for documentation and project management, include G-suite (especially spreadsheets), slack, JIRA,
• Strong understanding of MSME segmentation (from early stage startups to growth stage SMEs and the systemic challenges affecting their growth with a particular understanding of Uganda’s context;

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in at-least two fields that include Agribusiness, Health systems, Financial inclusion, tourism, education , ICTs ;

• Demonstrated expertise in performance management and linking data to improvements most especially youth employment programming;
• Demonstrated experience in developing knowledge sharing capabilities in organisations;
• Experience with managing complex data sets and databases, including conducting and supervising data analysis, report writing and design of creative data presentation and visualisation tools;
• Experience in working with large donor programming including UN initiatives;
• Strong ability to communicate progress and learnings from projects to colleagues
• Strong listening, documentation and presentation skills
• Excellent project management skills, including handling multi-stakeholder projects
• A self-starter with the ability to work independently and as part of a team
• You are flexible, adaptable and able to execute a range of job duties and changing priorities;
• You pay attention to the various sensitivities of various cultures;
• Ability to hold self and others accountable for work related commitments and deliverables, and consistently and all the time follow through on such commitments;
• Ability to travel at-least 70% of the time to various regions of the country;
• Ability to speak other local languages an added advantage

Please use our careers portal to apply for this position with the link below.

Deadline to submit is 14th August 2020. Only successful candidates will be contacted for interviews.

https://bit.ly/outboxMEL