Palladium Ghana Vacancies 2018

For the past 50 years, we have been making Positive Impact possible. With a team of more than 2,500 employees operating in 90 plus countries and a global network of more than 35,000 technical experts, Palladium has improved – and is committed to continuing to improve – economies, societies and most importantly, people’s lives. Palladium is a child-safe organisation, and screens applicants for suitability to work with children. We also provide equal employment to all participants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, veteran or marital status.

Job Description

Job Title: Senior MRM Officer

Project Overview and Role

The West Africa Food Markets Pilot Programme (WAFM) is a five-year DIFD-funded initiative implemented by the Palladium Group, leading a consortium including KPMG and Saana Consulting. WAFM aims for growth in supply of staple foods, particularly cereals, and in the purchasing power of farmers in food-insecure Sahelian countries, strengthening resilience against periodic food-deficit shocks and contributing to prosperity, stability and security. This is to be achieved via increased food production (yield increases and/or reduction in post-harvest losses) and cross-border trade along the Ghana-Burkina Faso and Niger-Nigeria trade corridors, thereby lowering seasonal price volatility in selected food markets. The programme is made up of two components, a Policy Facility and a Challenge Fund.

• Challenge Fund (CF): The CF incentivises businesses to pilot and scale pro-poor innovative activities to increase staple food and cereals production, processing and marketing, targeting and facilitating cross-border trade. This focuses on production and trade in cassava, maize, millet and sorghum.
• Policy Facility (PF): The PF supports interventions resulting in tangible gains in outreach, production and sales of smallholders, traders and processors via medium-term changes (attainable in 1-2 years) in policies, regulations, administrative directives and practices affecting the rules & institutions that promote cross-border trade in targeted cereals and associated processed food products and other products (HQCF, starch etc.)

Responsibilities

To coordinate Results Measurement on the WAFM programme and ensure robust, accurate effective measurement and strategic utilisation of all grantee intervention results as well as the targeted dissemination of intervention progress reports to all relevant stakeholders. S/he will be responsible for creating a strong and effective link between the Programme’s result measurement and grants management team. S/he will primarily be tasked with ensuring the existence of results chains and monitoring and evaluation processes for all grantee interventions, and the successful incorporation of results use into the overall programme strategy as well as the uniformed and targeted dissemination of progress information to donors and other stakeholders. S/he will play a critical role in quality assuring the self-reported data and evidence submitted by grantees and ensure grantee are resourced appropriately with the tools, and templates required by them to execute their reporting of results to WAFM.

Primary Responsibilities

• Overall responsible for managing M&E activities for WAFM on a day-to-day basis.
• Ensure the proper measurement of programme interventions by implementing programme M&E/ Results Measurement systems and procedures.
• Ensure the effective monitoring and documentation of all grantee intervention outputs by working with grantees and programme staff to establish results chains, coordinating all intervention guides for partner organisations and verifying the appropriateness of the sequence of activities identified.
• Conduct of data quality assessments and field verification missions to verify and quality assure data reported by grantees to ensure it is accurate and of good quality.
• Coordinate and supervise the research and analysis required to inform the programme strategies.
• Guided by the programme log frame, make annual self-assessments of progress and impact.
• Support the WAFM programme management in tasks linked to preparation for Annual Reviews and activities and assessments conducted by the Independent external M&E team commissioned by DFID (EMU)
• Ensure results measurement procedures are compliant with donor standards.
• Support baseline data collection for logframe indicators supported by RME M&E advisors as well as external consultants commissioned by the programme.
• Train, support and mentor other colleagues in M&E.
• Coordinate the collation of results in a database and dissemination of all programme progress reports and lessons learnt and contribute to the incorporation of these into the overall programme strategy.
• Assist in the preparation of programme’s bi-annual strategic reviews and work with the TL to facilitate these meetings.
• Manage the programme’s results measurement team including LT and ST staff.
• Support all DFID reviews, monitoring and evaluations ensuring that all DFID requirements are appropriately represented within the programme strategy.

Working Relationship

• Technical Portfolio Manager and Policy Facility Manager: The MRM Manager will work with the CF and PF managers during grantee contracting and start-up to establish results chains and routine monitoring plans. They will also work together to collect routine monitoring data on a periodic basis and coordinate verification and validation visits.
• Team Leader: The MRM Manger will report to the TL for day-to-day line management and liaison with the in-country team.
• Results Director: The MRM Manager will report to the Results Director for all technical direction, including M&E systems design, research design and results reporting. S/he will liaise with the RME M&E Advisor to ensure WAFM M&E is resourced with additional M&E inputs for critical M&E activities such as Logframe revision, Theory of Change reviews and preparations for Annual and other DFID commissioned reviews

• Please note that firms are also welcome to apply for this role.*