Liberia: Collaborating, Learning, and Adaptation Director

Apr 8, 2016 | ACDI/VOCA
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We are currently seeking a Collaborating, Learning, and Adaptation (CLA) Director for the anticipated USAID Office of Food for Peace funded Liberia Development Assistance (DFAP) Program. This multi-year, non-emergency program is integrated with USAID strategies to address the underlying causes of chronic food insecurity. The program’s ultimate goal is to reduce food insecurity among vulnerable households. The program focuses on strengthening livelihoods and improving nutrition among children under five, incorporating disaster risk reduction and response mechanisms and conflict sensitive approaches. The CLA Director will be responsible for the following:

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the CLA unit, which will encompass the project’s communications, M&E, training, and behavior change functions, providing a centralized point for analysis, strategic planning, and support to improve technical implementation, effective use of resources, and sustainability.
• Directly supervise the M&E Director (who will in term supervise a team of M&E staff), ensuring quality control, providing input into the development of indicator tracking tables, and alignment between performance monitoring efforts and the strategic information needs of the project and the donor.
• Oversee the training, behavior change, and communications functions of the project, including supervising staff, ensuring overall quality control and responsiveness of these efforts to the technical team needs, and facilitating integration of these efforts throughout project components.
• Lead the development of the project communications strategy, ensure quality control of project communications and marketing media, and provide high level editorial assistance and quality control to the publication of all project reporting and communications.
• Work directly with the technical project component leads to plan, design, and or/manage specific CLA strategies and activities, such as supporting incorporation of technical, contextual and experiential learning into technical strategies, interventions, and processes. Assist in developing, capturing, sharing, and testing methods, models, and tools to advance these objectives.
• Leverage a mix of informational sources and research methods – project M&E data, observations from staff and partners, primary and secondary market research - to (i) analyze project progress towards goals and learning objectives, (ii) communicate those findings externally (e.g. to donor, external partners) and internally (e.g. to project staff), and (iii) apply that learning into improved work-planning and project activities.
• Participate in regular senior management planning meetings, and provide analytical feedback and support to inform technical decisions by senior management and the technical component leads.
• Making presentations and facilitating workshop for sharing lessons learned, best practices and implementing approaches
• Coordinating country-level CLA initiatives directly with donor and other donor funded projects.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree (Masters preferable) in respective technical field and at least 7 years of relevant experience in knowledge management, communications, M&E, organizational learning and/or strategic learning in an international development context.
• Regional experience in Liberia or West Africa desired
• Familiarity with the concept of adaptive management/CLA, and demonstrated experience using a mix of informational sources and research methods to analyze project progress, communicate findings to a range of external and internal stakeholders, and apply learning to work planning.
• Experience providing leadership, supervising staff, managing multiple complex project components, and convening people across technical teams to build consensus and achieve an outcome.
• Experience contributing to the design and implementation of a development project’s strategic communications strategy required.
• Superior, demonstrated writing, reporting, and oral presentation skills (ability to provide an original writing sample required).
• Skills in graphic design (preferably Adobe InDesign), as well as video and web editing skills, desired but not required.