Current jobs related to MERL Director - Milton, Queensland - Investing in Women

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced MERL Director to lead our Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL) System. The successful candidate will be responsible for setting the strategic direction for our MERL System, ensuring it is coherent, relevant, and aligned with our program's goals.

The MERL Director will be the principal liaison point between our organization, DFAT, and program partners on MERL activities. Key responsibilities include:

• Setting the strategic direction for the MERL System, including demonstrated leadership on system coherence, relevance, alignment, and evaluation.
• Implementing the activities that comprise the MERL System, either directly, through the MERL team, or via management of technical advisory inputs.
• Ensuring the System is efficiently meeting the program's information needs.

The purpose of our MERL System is fourfold:

• To build the evidence base in the development of Southeast Asia-specific business cases for Women's Economic Empowerment (WEE) and Women's Global Empowerment (WGE), and thereby support advocacy for shifting practices and attitudes and investments related to WEE and WGE.
• To enable accountability to the Australian public and DFAT, specifically reporting on how the funding was used and what it achieved.
• To support our management and partners to track progress against the mutually reinforcing outcomes, learn how/why change is occurring, and inform decision-making for continuous improvement.
• To ensure the learning from an innovative aid investment serves to inform future DFAT investments and contribute to wider development learning. This relates specifically to better understanding how to work effectively with and through the private sector as well as effective strategies to influence policy and social norms in the digital age.

Specific duties of the MERL Director include:

• Providing leadership and quality assurance of all aspects of MERL System design and delivery, including ensuring they are underpinned by robust conceptual frameworks for gender equality and women's economic empowerment.
• Proactively ensuring the MERL system's key questions, performance indicators, and focus of data collection align with the evolving information needs of the Program.
• Working with DFAT in relation to MERL and ensuring that the MERL System provides data that is relevant to DFAT's reporting requirements.
• Providing strategic leadership to program staff and partners to develop and agree data collection, reporting, and dissemination approaches that are technically robust, fit-for-purpose, and efficient.
• Working collaboratively with partners and ensuring the MERL team supports capacity building with the IW implementation team and partners.
• Guiding, coordinating, and providing technical leadership on all MERL frameworks, designs, methods, and outputs.
• Providing strategic leadership and implementation oversight to IW research partnerships, the research agenda, and knowledge management, the program learning cycle, and contributing to program communications.
• Overseeing reporting and dissemination of MERL results (in collaboration with other parts of IW) including supporting the development and delivery of the agreed Annual Work Plans.
• Initiating continual innovation and improvement in the use, analysis, and reporting of program data and insights.
• Providing strong leadership of the MERL team to deliver all MERL Reports to a high standard, in line with the MERL Framework, and working collaboratively with the rest of the IW Team to provide high-quality inputs to other IW reports.
• Ensuring effective planning and budget management. Demonstrating effective people management and team capacity development.
• Planning for adaptive learning and capacity building with the IW implementation team and partners and reporting against progress.
• Overseeing an annual update of the MERL System to ensure it is still relevant to the Program's information needs, and is meeting these needs efficiently.
• Ensuring IW meets all MERL objectives as agreed in Annual Plans and other key documents.

This is a project-based role based in Canberra, Australia or Manila, Philippines. Other remote work locations in Australia and Southeast Asia will be considered.

We are an equal opportunity employer and encourage applications from experienced and capable women.