Consultant – Monitoring and Evaluation 260 views0 applications

OSISA is a growing African institution committed to deepening democracy, protecting human rights and enhancing good governance in the region. Our vision is to promote and sustain the ideals, values, institutions, and practices of open society, with the aim of establishing vibrant and tolerant southern African democracies in which people, free from material and other deprivation, understand their rights and responsibilities and participate actively in all spheres of life.

In pursuance of this vision, OSISA’s mission is to initiate and support programmes working towards open society ideals and to advocate for these ideals in southern Africa. Established in 1997, OSISA works in 11 southern African countries: Angola, Botswana, DRC, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. OSISA works differently in each of these eleven countries, according to local conditions.

Scope of Work

In order to achieve its mission and vision, OSISA consistently reviews its strategy periodically, tracks and assesses its grants portfolios and evaluates its programmes and partnerships to ensure alignment with our strategy, relevance, and impact of our efforts in the region of our work. Our current strategy 2019-2022 seeks to empower people and enhance their capacities to demand their rights, challenge oppression and discrimination and hold governments and other power brokers accountable.

The organisation has recently elected to amplify learning from our work and from that of our partners. This is being done through developing a comprehensive and coherent learning framework that guides the organisation on how we implement our strategy (i.e. our tactics and approaches); how we monitor and assess our work, how we manage the knowledge we collect through this process, how we enhance our own and our grantees and partners’ capacities for delivery of our strategy, as well as how we hold each other accountable in this learning process. The Learning framework is designed to guide the what and how we will learn to tell our story of impact in the strategy cycle 2021-2024.

Terms of Reference for the Tracking and assessment Consultant

OSISA is currently seeking the services of a seasoned Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) specialist to support our learning agenda through anchoring our Monitoring and evaluation activities. This will be a 24-month contract. The Specialist’s key roles will include:

• Further sharpening our MEL framework as we test and pilot it in 2020;
• Working closely with SALT Manager in designing, tailor-making and adapting tools and resources fit for OSISA context and realities;
• Supporting teams with clarifying clear milestones, markers, and indicators of progress and key learnings at various levels of our work;
• Leading OSISA teams on monitoring and evaluation missions as well as looping back feedback at the programme and cluster levels;
• Working closely with team Manager to support OSISA teams to undertake portfolio reviews, strategic operational project evaluations, key grant project assessments, and OSISA own concepts and initiatives’ reviews;
• Supporting teams with abilities to track and assess internal systems, culture, and behaviour to ensure alignment with organisational objectives;
• Supporting programme teams to design and lead periodic country forums for programmatic and organisational learning;
• Assist teams to easily link the strategy to the tracking and assessment framework; and
• Working closely with team Manager to design feedback loops and strategies to ensure M&E is an effective pathway for learning and improving programme quality; Supporting team Manager with facilitating periodic strategy reviews.

Key Deliverables

• Our MEL framework is further sharpened and widely shared and piloted in 2020 and beyond.
• Resources and tools designed, adapted, collected and teams are supported with skills, capacities, and competencies to use them effectively in M&E processes.
• Teams supported by developing clear milestones, markers, and indicators of progress at various levels of our work.
• Monitoring missions undertaken and clear lessons drawn and shared widely in OSISA.
• Portfolio reviews successfully undertaken and key lessons drawn and shared widely in OSISA.
• Programme teams supported to undertake country forums and key lessons drawn from these are collated to inform strategy and improve programme quality.

Required Competencies and Qualifications

This role is primarily a support function which requires the person to work very closely with others internally (i.e. diverse staff in Johannesburg, Angola and DRC) as well as externally (grantees and partners in 11 countries, as well as other OSF networks and sister Foundations). This requires an individual with:

• Very high levels of self-awareness, self-mastery and self-leadership;
• Demonstrable technical skills and competences to link strategic goals into MEL systems, tools and processes, preferably honed on the African continent;
• Demonstrable knowledge and understanding of current discourses and trends in MEL in the broader field;
• Experience in programming for social justice preferably on the African continent;
• Demonstrable knowledge of Southern Africa’s political, economic, social and cultural realities;
• Social skills and competences (demonstrated through successful delivery working in teams and groups);
• Demonstrable experience in working and supporting MEL functions in a grant-making entity working on the continent (strongly desirable);
• Tertiary level qualification in social sciences or related relevant field or at least 7 years of experience in a MEL function;
• Demonstrable experience of designing and adapting tools to suit context;
• Spoken and written French and/or Portuguese language a strong advantage; and
• Ability to work in South Africa and to start urgently.