Overview
Leads organisational efforts to become a learning-oriented organisation, ensuring data, evidence, and cost-informed programming drive scalable impact for children.
Key Responsibilities
- Provide strategic and operational leadership across four units: Insights and Learning, Research and Evaluation, Ethics and Evidence Generation, and Economic Evaluation.
- Drive a coordinated agenda for data, evidence, evaluation, ethics, and learning.
- Improve systems and incentives for learning.
- Focus organisational efforts on questions, metrics, and insights that influence decisions.
- Oversee the design and implementation of impact intelligence systems.
- Ensure MEAL frameworks, standards, policies, and tools are coherent and integrated.
- Partner with IT, data, and digital teams to implement fit-for-purpose tools.
- Lead a strategic prioritisation of impact intelligence.
- Ensure global indicators, MEAL standards, research, and evaluation agendas are aligned to priority decisions.
- Embed processes for insights to be translated into programmatic and influencing decisions.
- Act as a hub connecting evidence, data, and learning across clusters and functions.
- Build and steward collaboration mechanisms between units and related functions.
- Convene cross-unit communities and platforms to share insights.
- Lead the Insights and Learning unit to transform data into actionable insights.
- Oversee movement-wide capacity strengthening for MEAL, research, learning, and cost-informed programming.
- Promote and model learning behaviours.
- Ensure high-quality MEAL architectures, tools, and practices are in place.
- Champion and oversee strategic initiatives such as Prime and Global Indicators.
- Ensure accountability to communities, children, and young people is central to MEAL practice.
- Lead the Research and Evaluation unit to design and deliver a portfolio of studies and evaluations.
- Oversee the Ethics and Evidence Generation unit to ensure robust ethical governance.
- Promote partnerships with research institutions, governments, and peer agencies.
- Lead the Economic Evaluation unit to integrate cost, cost-effectiveness, and value-for-money analysis.
- Ensure economic evidence is presented in accessible ways for non-specialist decision-makers.
Required Experience
- Demonstrated track record in leading organisational learning and evidence agendas in large, complex, multi-country organisations.
- Extensive experience leading research and evaluation portfolios aligned to strategic priorities.
- Experience overseeing or closely collaborating with ethics and research governance functions.
- Experience integrating economic evaluation or cost-informed analysis into programme and influencing decisions, or proven ability to lead specialist teams in this area.
- Strong record of building and leading diverse, geographically dispersed teams, and of working through influence and matrix structures.
Qualifications
- Advanced Degree: A post-graduate degree (Masters or PhD preferred) in a related field such as international development, social sciences, planning & statistics.
- Desirable: Certification in Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL) and in research, evaluation methodologies is highly desirable.
