Monitoring, Evaluation and Impact Assessment Consultant (Firm) At Mercy Corps

About Mercy Corps AgriFin

AgriFin, a Mercy Corps innovative program currently represents a $12 million, four-year program working in Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Nigeria, with potential to expand to other markets (Uganda+). In partnership with Bayer Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, AgriFin seeks to support the expansion of digitally enabled services to 5 million smallholder farmers, delivered by growing ecosystems of diverse service providers and building farmer income, productivity and resilience by 50% while reaching 40% women.

The program’s core innovations are: 1) a rapid iteration engagement model to drive innovative, client-centric product development; and 2) our work with partners to develop “bundles” of mobile-enabled services offering farmers affordable access to digital financial and market informational services. Our support programming is focused on enabling the following critical areas of innovation, that will follow an ecosystem and market facilitation approach supported through partnership activities and dissemination of evidence-based learning to ecosystem actors following a Market Systems Development (MSD) approach, with a strong gender focus**:**

•Agricultural Advisory and Smart Farming Solutions, drawing on Climate Smart Agriculture (dCSA)

•Appropriate Digitally Enabled Financial Services for SHF

•Digital Platform Models Providing Market Access, Financing, Information and Resources

•Digital Channels, Logistics and Mechanization*•Use of Digital Data for Decisioning, Product Development & Risk Management.**

Scope of Work

We are seeking a Research Consultant to assist the AgriFin program over 2 years in the implementation of activities on monitoring, evaluation and impact assessment with its partners across the countries of focus. The consultant will provide technical support on the development of M&E frameworks, systems and surveys protocols and tools to aid data collection, analysis and development to inform program implementation and partnerships and promote the dissemination of insights and learnings for public learning within the ecosystem and AGRIFIN’s community of practice.

The consultant shall on a regular basis provide a series of services and deliverables to Mercy Corps Agrifin on an ongoing basis within the overall scope of work, supported by more detailed specific agreements and budgets for each individual assignment. AgriFin Program will provide specific scopes of work for each engagement with specific required combinations of technical services under subcontracts to the consultant, governed by this umbrella scope of work. The overall technical support services will include:

● Support development of M&E frameworks and systems and conduct data collection and report writing with, to Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) activities to inform impact outcomes as a result of usage of digital financial/non-financial and information services.

● Conduct regular data collection through implementing partners and ensure quality of the data by random verifications and validations.

● Document, record, manage and preserve M&E data in a safe and accessible way.

● Generate insights and discuss findings based on regular M&E data.

● Support on M&E and evidence-based recommendations, articulation and finalization of learning questions to the relevant Project Managers and Partners.

● Execute impact assessments using various approaches including Randomized control trials, instrumental methods and Difference in Difference approaches, including working with Lean data and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development approaches

● Develop protocols for conducting surveys, that include face to face using paper and digital tools, phone-based surveys and SMS surveys to fulfill impact and evaluation objectives, while ensuring that the tools developed, and implementation of field activities adheres to AgriFin objectives.

● Develop learning outputs and present them in audience specific forms that include slides, blogs and development of case studies.

● Recommend changes and improvements to existing tools used in monitoring and evaluation and client feedback and can include development of M&E plans.

● ​​Update and share selected learning publicly, through updating the Evidence Gap Map (Evidence repository), using dynamic and visually appealing formats, to drive improved understanding of the environment for digital services for smallholder farmers.

**

This project implementation shall be fully consultative with the Agrifin program and its partners, and all workshops, research results, and recommended strategies will be developed in conjunction with partners so that strategic alignment is built within the program.