Overview

The Rainforest Alliance is creating a more sustainable world by using social and market forces to protect nature and improve the lives of farmers and forest communities. To achieve our mission, we partner with diverse allies around the world to drive positive change across global supply chains and in many of our most critically important natural landscapes.

Our alliance spans 70 countries and includes farmers and forest communities, companies, governments, civil society, and millions of individuals. Together we work to protect forests and biodiversity, take action on climate, and promote the rights and improve the livelihoods of rural people.

As an international nonprofit organization with more than 30 years of experience in sustainability transformation, we understand that the social and economic well-being of rural communities is tightly connected to ecosystem health. This knowledge has shaped our rigorous programs to advance sustainable land-use and commodity production.

At the Rainforest Alliance we combat climate change, protect forests and biodiversity, promote human rights, and improve livelihoods. The enormity of the social and environmental challenges we are facing requires working together in a broad alliance. This is why we bring farmers, forest communities, companies, and consumers together to change the way the world produces, sources, and consumes.

Position Summary:

At the Rainforest Alliance, we are looking for a collaborative and results oriented Senior Associate, Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (MEL). The Senior Associate MEL is responsible for coordinating and carrying out a LandScale-based Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) and Performance Management Framework and activities in Rainforest Alliance’s Landscapes & Livelihoods project in Ghana. The Senior Associate MEL will lead the LEAN (Landscapes and Environmental Agility across the Nation) project by working with Rainforest Alliance staff, project consortium partners, consultants and stakeholders to build, lead and incorporate a multi-stakeholder LandScale tool, a framework outlining core environmental and social dimensions of sustainability in landscapes and providing environmental, social, and economic indicators to measure sustainability.

This role will include designing and evaluating implementation of project activities; training technical staff, project partners, and field consultants on M&E methods and tools; ensuring proper output and outcome indicator data collection, quality control, analysis, and management; and reporting on key findings. The position will also coordinate closely with other Rainforest Alliance units. The position is open to expand in time and geography depending on funding and development.

This role also includes supporting Landscape Management Bodies in rolling out and implementing LandScale-based, context adjusted systems to monitor their landscape´s performance. It will involve a Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) system for the Action, while ensuring coordination of concerted efforts to build evidence and knowledge sharing across several landscapes.

Responsibilities:

• The Rainforest Alliance’s Core Values are Impact, Change, Collaboration, Openness and Trust and as such they form the basis of the behaviours we demonstrate;
• Develop the project´s MEL Plan, including tools, processes, and responsibilities to track project progress, assess its achievements, address the project´s challenges and risks, and documents its lessons learned, in consultation with MEL expert, and Senior Project Manager;
• In coordination with the Project Manager, technically supports a participatory process in Landscape Governance Bodies leading to the design and implementation by the project´s Landscape Governance Bodies of context-specific, Landscale-based M&E systems (including methods, tools and processes, employing GIS and satellite imagery) in each of the project´s target landscapes;
• Designs and provide support, directly and remotely to actors of landscape governance bodies on M&E methods, tools and processes, ensuring M&E best practices;
• Collaborate with the Project´s Manager in the design and conduction of field-based baseline, mid-term, and end of project studies to understand needs, gaps, and opportunities for achieving rural development outcomes in the context of business and local community needs, and to assess the project´s contribution to such outcomes;
• Design and provide remote and person-to-person training and technical assistance to staff, project partners, and field consultants on M&E methods, tools and processes, ensuring M&E best practices;
• Implement and take responsibility for quality control procedures to ensure transparent, evidence-based M&E systems, based on reliable and timely field data collection, management and analysis, to generate and report high-quality output and outcome indicator values;
• Support Project Managers in maintaining updated project information in the Project Management Platform and SharePoint-based project sites;
• Support Project Managers in the preparation of quality and timely project performance technical reports as required by donors, as well as in the preparation of presentations to partners, and other Rainforest Alliance colleagues and departments; and
• Ensure that Rainforest Alliance´s Key Performance Indicators are embedded in project design; and M&E best practices into the project.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s Degree in international development, Agriculture, Social Sciences, Economics, Natural Resources Management or related field;
• Minimum 5 years of experience in similar position, including minimum of 2 years of experience conducting project M&E activities including as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) officer for designing, delivery and impact assessments of programs and projects, and/or related studies;
• Experience in software programs including ArcGIS, QGIS, ERDAS Imagine, Global Mapper, ENVI, STATA, SPSS, KOBO Toolbox, CSPro, R. and computer Microsoft Office (Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Publisher);
• Has hands-on experience in co-designing and implementation of cost-effective performance-based and community-based monitoring systems, and the collection, management, analysis and reporting of high-quality output and outcome indicator data;
• Experience advising and supervising field teams or consultants in the collection of field data on social, environmental and/or agronomic and/or socioeconomic indicators for performance assessment, and in the use of associated field methods and tools (household surveys, farm monitoring, etc.);
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills; with required fluency in English, and knowledge of French, a big plus;
• Demonstrated ability to build capacity for project M&E among project staff, partners and key actors in local communities;
• Ability to travel locally and internationally at least 40% of the time.