Summary
Date Posted: Tuesday, July 19, 2022 , Base Salary: Not Disclosed

JOB DETAILS:
Impact & Design Director
About Spark Microgrants
Spark MicroGrants believes in a world where everyone lives with dignity and determines their own positive future. Decades of prescriptive aid have sidelined the poor from the very programs meant to uplift them. Spark works with communities, governments and local organizations to catalyze sustained collective action in villages facing poverty by providing communities the resources and skills they need to design and implement a development project of their choosing - this could mean planting crops, starting a local business, building a school or anything else the community feels best serves their needs.

The foundation is Spark's Facilitated Collective Action Process (FCAP) where communities are led through regular facilitated meetings to organize, conceptualize and implement their chosen project and receive a microgrant to fund it.
Spark supports implementation of the FCAP in rural communities to improve local livelihoods, enhance social cohesion, and improve citizen engagement.

About The Role
We are seeking an Impact & Design Director to lead monitoring & evaluation, programmatic research and learning, technical and technological innovations in program design at Spark. We are looking for a senior strategic leader who will lead a large and diverse portfolio of work, bring international technical expertise, champion a collaborative working approach - especially with the Program teams - and demonstrate excellence in management, mentoring, and leadership. A key point of focus will be Spark’s flagship program with the Government of Rwanda, which has an ambitious strategy to strengthen village level governance and enhance rural livelihoods across the country. Spark aims to scale this model of collaboration across multiple countries in the coming five years.

Responsibilities
Strategic Leadership & Department Management

You will manage a large and diverse team, and play a key role as part of Spark’s executive leadership team, helping to set and deliver on strategic goals for the organization and contributing to management decisions. Responsibilities include:
• Championing a culture of feedback, learning and iteration to ensure Spark’s M&E and learning systems continue to adapt, improve, and feed into program decisions.
• Cross-team collaboration - ensure the M&E, Research and Learning, and Design departments work closely with other Spark teams to support roll-out of and training on these systems across all partners, and effective coordination around learning, evidence generation, and design strategies.
• Drive departmental strategy including setting and achieving departmental and organizational goals.
• Manage, develop and retain the team setting clear responsibility domains, deliverables, growth opportunities, and support to achieve their goals.
• Lead to day to day running of a variety of strategically important projects, ensuring that all projects are delivered on-time, within scope and within budget (see details below).
• Establish and sustain critical productive relationships with Board members, donors, partners, and industry stakeholders (e.g. researchers, academics) to advance Spark’s ability to draw on and influence a wide range of advisers and industry partners in our work.

Monitoring and Evaluation: Lead Spark’s monitoring and evaluation functions across our global portfolio.
Ensure M&E teams works closely with other Spark teams such as the training department to support roll-out of and training on these systems across all partners.
• Data consolidation and analysis, linked to program quality and organizational learning objectives, and to support partner-driven learning and program management.
• Database management
• Ensure high quality monitoring, smooth functioning of data systems and provision of timely reports to internal and external stakeholders.
• Oversee development and implementation of monitoring tools, analyses and learning projects that are robust, iterative and effective at capturing the impact of the Spark process within partner communities, including tools to garner rapid end-user feedback about program quality (“citizen feedback”).
• Model a service mentality of adapting and designing M&E systems that make it easy for our partners to track and improve the quality of their programs.
• Ensure M&E and research tools are aligned with industry standards and emerging best practices in the field of community-driven development.
• Leading the design and implementation of internal and external impact evaluations. Lead the relationship with external researchers and institutions.
• Monitoring the effectiveness and quality of safeguards systems in Rwanda, including ensuring spot-checks on the use of Microgrant project risk screening tools, and monitoring the performance of the grievance redress mechanism.

Key M&E projects in 2022-23 include:
• Management of the contracts for two external evaluations commissioned for Rwanda.
• Design and contracting of external impact evaluation in Malawi, including working with partners in Malawi to embed evaluation design into programmatic expansion to allow randomized treatment arms.

Research and Learning: Lead Spark’s research and learning functions across our global portfolio.
• Developing and researching key ‘learning questions’ annually, contributing to address internal and industry-wide learning and evidence gaps, and aligned with the organization's strategy and vision.
• Ensure learnings and data are contributing to Spark’s organizational strategy & goals as we scale our model through partners.
• Develop partnerships with other evaluation groups, universities and data collection teams to push Spark to continuously test new ways of measuring and further understanding our impact - and share these results with the sector.
• Map out existing research, network within the sector and gather learnings and evidence to inform the development of standards for facilitation and community-driven development and align Spark’s learning agenda and exchange with these standards.

Key Research and Learning projects in 2022-23 include:
• Assessment of 1) impact of FCAP on gender dynamics as the village level and 3) environmental impact of FCAP at the village level.
• Generating evidence from with the Rwanda pilot program to directly inform national scale design, and disseminating learning and advice regularly through the Rwanda Policy Working group.

Design: Develop and lead Spark’s product design functions
Spark’s Design team are responsible for quality design of programmatic tools for partners, based on the FCAP approach. The FCAP is a guiding framework based on 6 core principles, while Spark’s specific programs are designed based on the country and partnership context. The Design team lead the process of user-centred adaptation of the ‘core’ FCAP modules and principles to meet the development needs and opportunities facing communities, and the skills and capacities of our partners in implementation.

Responsibilities include:
• Developing and leading co-design processes with partners. We work with partners through an approach incorporating human-centred design methodologies to co-create programs with partners based on shared goals.
• Develop technical and technological tools for program implementation and management, based on partners needs. This includes developing monitoring frameworks and data collection systems, facilitation guides, and microgrant tracking tools (financial and technical).
• Overseeing the deployment and improvement of the CommCare system
• Staying abreast of global innovations and evidence across the industry, from best practices in community facilitation, to citizen monitoring and feedback, and embedding learning and innovations into our portfolio.
• Overseeing and maintaining grievance redress mechanism (community and stakeholder feedback system) in Rwanda

Key Design projects in 2022-23 include:
• Designing and managing tech teams to deliver a mobile app for remote delivery of FCAP. Deployment of the first module is expected in Malawi by end of the year and iterative improvements envisioned over the next 2-3 years.
• Rolling out a training curriculum to 500 learners in Malawi.

Qualifications, experience & skills:
• 8-10 years of relevant experience, such as in M&E, delivering high quality research and technology tools, and program design;
• Masters Degree in the field of Economics, International Development, Social Science, or related fields;
• Excellent track record in designing and managing rigorous research projects and research partnerships;
• Proven track record of developing and deploying monitoring systems;
• Demonstrated experience in management and a record of leading and developing diverse teams;
• Ability to operate independently and strong in working as part of a larger team;
• Strong project management skills and attention to detail are required;
• Experience in strategy development is desirable;
• Excellent English written and oral communication;
• Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Office / G-Suite applications;
• Remains calm and positive under pressure and in difficult situations;
• Experience of working with academics, governments and donor institutions required. Experience working with the World Bank would be advantageous.

Other Information
Job Location: Flexible in locations in East Africa, preferred in Kigali, Rwanda
Estimated start date: As soon as possible">

Work Hours: 8

Experience in Months: 120

Level of Education: Bachelor Degree

Job application procedure
Follow this link to apply http://sparkmicrogrants.bamboohr.com/jobs 

Please note that we are able to sponsor visa applications for this position.


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