Job Title:  Systems and Information Coordinator (M&E Team)

Organisation: Lively Minds

Duty Station:  Jinja, Uganda with occasional travel to Ghana

Reports to: Head of Monitoring and Evaluation

Compensation: Band 4, 25,468,240 UGX, rising to 29,288,476 UGX after 1 year subject to meeting performance expectations

Contract: Fixed term contract for two years

About US:

Our mission is to get preschool children in rural Africa school-ready. At present over 250 million children worldwide fail to receive the education and care they need in their early years which means they are less likely to do well in school, find gainful employment, and are at greater risk of early marriage, early parenthood and even criminality. Current approaches to solving this crisis are not proving effective or scalable in lower middle income countries.

That’s where Lively Minds comes in. We have developed an award-winning Early Childhood Development programme that has been proven to get pre-schoolers in hard-to-reach communities school-ready, so they have a greater chance of succeeding in school and in life. The programme provides marginalised Mothers with a parenting course that empowers them to run educational Play Schemes for pre-schoolers and to provide better home-based care, using cheap local resources.  The programme is delivered through government partners, is cheap and highly scalable. It genuinely has the potential to play a transformative role in ending the global ECD crisis.

We’re a lively ambitious organisation, determined to have a major positive impact on the world. We work hard, at a fast pace, in a challenging environment. We expect everyone to give their best to achieve the best possible results. Our work is demanding but provides plenty of opportunity for innovation, responsibility, growth, collaboration, creativity and fun. We want all staff to be happy, fulfilled and to feel appreciated and valued in their work.

Over the past few years the Lively Minds programme has been delivered in over 350 communities in rural Ghana and Uganda reaching over 50,000 children. During COVID we launched a radio programme for parents and this is now reaching over 2million households each week. We are extremely proud that the Government of Ghana have now adopted the programme and we have a ground-breaking partnership with them to support them to institutionalise it and to scale it to over 4000 communities reaching over 1million children. We see this partnership as the test case that will provide the blueprint to take the programme to scale in Uganda and elsewhere within the next 5 years.

There is a lot of work to be done as we go through this step-change. We have recently grown our team from 45 to nearly 100 FTEs. We are developing new systems and processes to ensure that our government partners are able to deliver to quality standards at scale, and our staff are enabled to provide them with high-quality technical support.

Job Summary:  We want the organisation and our programme to be data driven. We are recruiting a Systems and Information Co-ordinator, who will work within our Monitoring and Evaluation team to play a key role in evidencing the impact of our work for preschool children in Ghana and Uganda. The role will report to the Head of Monitoring and Evaluation and will be based at our office in Jinja, Uganda. You will work closely with our Ghana and Uganda implementation teams to collect data that tracks and evidences our work.

Key Duties and Responsibilities:

• Ensure the quality assurance of the data dashboards used to monitor programme progress and quality in real time. This includes conducting spotchecks and liaising with vendors to oversee updates and corrections to the dashboards.
• Creation and updating of mobile monitoring forms in Kobo and Clickmedix, including liaising with the vendor when more complex changes are required
• Support Head of M&E in developing training for staff and government on monitoring systems
• Deliver training for colleagues and government partners in Ghana and Uganda on using the mobile monitoring forms
• Deliver training for colleagues and government partners Ghana an Uganda on interpreting and using the programme dashboard
• Liaising with colleagues in the Content and Implementation teams to ensure that input from the M&E team is of high quality and shared in a timely manner (e.g. updates to monitoring forms and analysis of programme data)
• Supporting the M&E Officer to resolve M&E-related requests made by colleagues to ensure that the M&E team delivers excellent ‘customer service’ to the wider organisation
• Responsible for termly surveys of schools in, or about to join, the programme Responsible for providing a termly summary of programme data to determine if
• implementing partners are implementing the programme to the required standard against key stage gate indicators
• Line management of M&E Officer (based in Tamale, Ghana)
• You may be assigned any other responsibility in agreement with your line manager, in contribution to Lively Minds work and in recognition of your experience and skills. It is therefore expected for staff to be flexible and willing to contribute to the work of the wider team.

Qualifications, Skills and Experience:

• Be passionate about optimising data management and availability to drive programme quality
• Have an aptitude for understanding complex data management systems and supporting colleagues to use these effectively
• Take pride in constantly monitoring progress and results to iterate and get the best result
• Be creative, proactive, and energetic: bringing new ideas and a can-do attitude to get to the very best sustainable results.
• Be a team player that values and prioritises inclusivity: helping to create a positive work environment where everyone is motivated and feels able to participate, learn, improve and contribute

Essential Experience and Skills

• 3-5 years’ experience in M&E, IT or similar field
• Excellent attention to detail: produces high-quality, accurate work in a timely manner Excellent IT skills, including advanced Excel skills in data cleaning and analysis
• Experience of working with mobile data collection tools such as KOBO, ClickMedix, ODK or similar, including creating and updating data collection forms and providing technical support to staff members using the forms to collect data.
• Ability to manage and prioritise own workload with minimal supervison, whilst providing high quality ‘customer service’ to colleagues
• Experience of line management

Desirable experience and skills

• Undergraduate degree (preferably in statistics, mathematics or IT) Experience delivering training and building the capacity of others Experience of working as part of a remote team
• Experience of working in the early childhood development/education sector Experience of delivering a programme alongside government partners
• You will be expected to perform against the Lively Minds Competencies.

How to Apply:

If this sounds like you, please complete an application form, Download Here, and send the filled form to jobs@livelyminds.org

Due to resource constraints, we apologise, but we will only respond to shortlisted candidates. Lively Minds operates a strict Child & Vulnerable Adult Protection Policy, and we therefore check suitability of successful candidates though background checks consisting of references and police checks.

Deadline: Sunday 26^th June 2022 by 11:59pm EAT

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