Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Specialist

**About RRI**

The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) is a global coalition of over 150 organizations dedicated to advancing the forest, land, and resource rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, Afro-descendant Peoples, and in particular the women within these groups. RRI’s members capitalize on each other’s strengths, expertise, and geographic reach to achieve solutions more effectively and efficiently. RRI leverages the power of its global coalition to amplify the voices of local peoples and proactively engage governments, multilateral institutions, and private sector actors to adopt institutional and market reforms that support the realization of rights.

**_ Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Specialist (MEL)_**

The Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) Specialist will play a cross-cutting role within the RRI Coalition by ensuring that RRI effectively deploys its energy and resources to achieve its institutional goals and priorities, and that CLARIFI's strategic funds are used effectively to realize their desired impact. The specialist will track and report progress towards stated results for both RRI framework and its CLARIFI mechanism, and capture lessons learned from associated interventions to guide the direction of future endeavors and showcase success and challenges.

The MEL Specialist will contribute to the design, development, and day-to-day management of MEL strategies for RRI and CLARIFI. This strategy will serve three functions: (i) provide accountability towards desired results; (ii) foster learning and sharing within RRI and across its partners and grantees; and (iii) strengthen strategies and interventions through the validation of the assumptions and theories of change that are used to guide actions. The MEL specialist will work closely with the RRI Senior Director of Programs and the CLARIFI Director to develop and manage solutions to field-level monitoring and organizational learning that are consistent with a “living strategy” approach. Among other tasks, the Specialist will contribute to the design and implementation of results frameworks, monitoring systems, theories of change, reporting tools, knowledge infrastructure, lessons synthesis, and donor reports.

**Primary Responsibilities**:
**Strengthen and maintain RRI’s Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning System (30%)**:

- Review, strengthen, and maintain RRI’s MEL system and associated data infrastructure;
- Support program-level data collection and reporting;
- Review and design quantitative and qualitative performance indicators across programs;
- Provide quality assurance oversight of data collection, analysis, and reporting;
- Contribute to the design and implementation of organizational learning tools and processes, including system and staff-level reflection and learning efforts;
- Provide technical back-stopping support to program staff on MEL tools, data collection, and reporting;
- Track and document lessons learned in support of donor reporting and future programs;
- Monitor and assess the validity of RRI’s Theory of Change and its underlying assumptions;
- Contribute to design of robust results frameworks in donor proposals;
- Support external program evaluations of specific grants or program-wide assessments;
- Work with the Regional and Thematic programs and communications team to effectively communicate the results, challenges, and impact of RRI to a wider audience.

**Design and maintain CLARIFI’s Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning system (30%)**:

- Develop and manage solutions to the ongoing monitoring, evaluation and learning needs of the Initiative consistent with a ‘living strategy’ approach and aligned with RRI’s overall MEL system;
- Contribute to designing low-cost but meaningful impact metrics for the Initiative based on available or soon-to-be available data, which nests bottom-up impact goals within a coherent global impact framework;
- Adapt and refine tools for collecting and sharing information necessary to monitor Initiative activities and narrative;
- Implement, refine and maintain consistent data collection methods for indicators;
- Contribute to the development, design and implementation of knowledge infrastructure and information technology solutions to support coordinated execution of the MEL strategy across grantees, as well as real-time sharing of intelligence and learning from the field; and
- Collect data from across RRI teams that are contributing to Initiative project deliverables, and draft progress reports.

**Synthesize and Extract Lessons and Contribute to Communication (20%)**:

- Extract and synthesize performance data from across RRI regional and thematic programs
and CLARIFI, and help communicate that information to partners, members and the public through effective and compelling means (interactive dashboards, storytelling);
- Contribute guidance to CLARIFI/ RRI program staff and RRI Partners and extended Collaborators on MEL best practices including Logic Mod