Impact & Design Director at Spark MicroGrants:(Deadline:13-08-2022)

We are hiring an Impact & Design Director

ABOUT SPARK MICROGRANTS

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 the 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. Our community-based development model aims to catalyse social and economic transitions in the context of development opportunities present in each country we work in.

After years of refining our community organizing and seed funding model for rural village action we are garnering demand from emerging nations and leading civil society organizations to train and support them to adapt and deploy the approach at scale.

Spark is now active in 500+ villages in 6 countries,  benefiting over 230,000 lives. In the next three years, we seek to accelerate the growth of this approach, through i) establishing a global Community of Practice with partners based on cutting edge facilitation and training design, ii) establishing a national scale program in Rwanda – our flagship program – in partnership with the Government of Rwanda, and iii) establishing and expanding a newly launched pilot program in Malawi. Spark is seeking an ambitious and impact-driven leader to champion our work in evidence-driven program design, research, and monitoring and evaluation  This is a dynamic and innovative role sitting across our global portfolio, and working closely with our operations and programming teams. Key responsibilities are generation of robust evidence of impact, developing and maintaining strong evidence-program-policy linkages, and leading technical and technological innovations in program design.

As a team, we share a set of common values that shape ‘how’ we work. These are:

1. Facilitators. We don’t impose; we enable others to generate impact.
2. Community-driven. We are motivated by what is best for the community.
3. Process-centered. The how of what we do is just as important as the what.
4. Authentic. Our vision and values live in everything we do.
5. Dynamic. We seek opportunities and are willing to take risks to serve our community partners better.

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.

As a first step in this strategy, Spark has secured a $6 million World Bank-Comic Relief grant through the Japanese Social Development Fund, for the Advancing Citizen Engagement (ACE) Project. The project kicked off in June 2021. The project will improve the livelihoods of 85,000 people across 249 villages in Rwanda, and enhance Local and Central Government capacity for participatory village planning, utilising Spark’s tried and tested model for village development, the Facilitated Collective Action Process (FCAP). The project includes an external evaluation of the project. Your strategic leadership will guarantee strong evaluation of the program and continuous data-driven decision making contributing to setting on the path to national scale in Rwanda.

In Rwanda the Impact & Design Director will provide strategic support to the Policy Director and the Country Director in bringing the FCAP to scale in Rwanda. Specifically, the Impact & Design Director will participate in national, multilateral, and global partnerships for research.

In your role you will be part of the leadership team and interact with the Board of Directors. You will work with a team of 60+ staff, own research and actively contribute to funding partner relationships. You will manage a team of approximately 16 people across monitoring and evaluation, research and learning, program and product design, and training. You will also manage consultants and large research contracts compliant with World Bank and other large donors’ procurement guidelines.

Along with our work in Rwanda, Spark is partnering with the Government of Malawi to test FCAP’s modifications to the Malawian context and subsequent expansion to large scale. We are strategically focussing on technology-led delivery of FCAP in Malawi to explore ways to improve impact and reduce cost of delivery. As part of the pilot in Malawi, we are aiming to do a variety of testing on programmatic input areas including grant sizes, length and duration of training and role of technology. Based on the learnings above, we are aiming to run a RCT starting mid-2023. We are doing similar testing through our partners in Uganda and Liberia too. We are also exploring opportunities to layer aligned interventions on FCAP to generate maximum impact for communities and leverage the investment of intensive FCAP delivery over an extended period of time.

We are looking for candidates who will be excited to join us at a crucial juncture in our growth when we are investing heavily in high quality research, incorporating technology into our program delivery and have strong partnerships with governments, civil society and funders. In addition to technical skills we also want the person in this leadership role to have a passion for a culture of excellence. The right candidate will not want to do ‘development as usual’ but question ‘how’ aid works and ensure that Spark’s program is ultimately accountable to the villages we serve. The Impact & Design Director will continue our excellent work in establishing a culture of learning and evidence-based decision-making within Spark and our partners.

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. 

The M&E systems are characterised by direct implementation of data collection and monitoring systems in Rwanda, and provision of monitoring frameworks and tools to partners in other countries, alongside training and mentoring support to ensure quality utilization. You will lead the M&E team in fulfilment of their objectives of ensuring efficient, high-quality, and context appropriate data collection and analysis, database management, generating robust evidence of program quality and impact across our work. This includes:

• 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.

Spark undertakes both internal and externally funded and implemented research projects with the joint goals of generating evidence to inform internal program design and quality improvement, and broader sectoral knowledge informing quality standards and evidence across community-driven development approaches internationally. Leadership of these functions includes:

• 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.

WHO YOU ARE:

You are a seasoned professional with significant expertise in impact evaluation, program monitoring, passion for leveraging technology and an interest in making research accessible to the layperson. You thrive in bringing order to chaos, understanding a variety of stakeholders, requirements and priorities and bringing them all together into coherent and systematic processes for delivery. You enjoy being part of a team with ambitious ideas and you gain energy from turning those ambiguous ideas into a pragmatic reality.  You are a clear communicator, understanding differing styles and backgrounds and you bring things up to your colleagues proactively that need to be discussed.

REQUIREMENTS:

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.

Safeguarding

Our safeguarding follows a do no harm principle. All Spark staff are expected to respect and uphold the safeguarding procedures and principles to minimise harm to stakeholders, program participants, and the environment, in compliance with the World Bank Environmental and Social Framework and Rwandan Legislation.

OTHER INFORMATION

Job Location: Flexible in locations in East Africa, preferred in Kigali, Rwanda

Estimated start date: As soon as possible

Application closing Date: On a rolling basis, we reserve the right to close this recruitment process not later than 13th August 2022.

How to Apply: Follow this link to apply http://sparkmicrogrants.bamboohr.com/jobs

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

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

Spark Microgrants provides equal employment and advancement opportunities to all individuals. Employment decisions at Spark are based on merit, qualifications, and abilities. Spark does not discriminate in employment opportunities or practices on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, gender identity, age, disability, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by the law. Spark will make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with known disabilities unless doing so would result in undue hardship to daily operations.