Senior Advisor for Research & Quality Assurance , IMA WorldHealth

IMA is currently seeking candidates for a program to support interventions designed to reduce the prevalence of stunting among children under the age of five. IMA has secured DFID funding for a five-year project to support the Ministry of Health (MOH) in six to eight regions and will look, specifically to 1) support interventions to build knowledge, change attitudes, strengthen practice and expand services in order to prevent low birth weight and stunting
2) retrain facility and community resource persons to ensure community engagement
3) deliver overall nutrition components
4) build capacity for planning, programming, budgeting and financial management to sustainably address stunting.

The Senior Advisor will play a key role in supporting the team lead in ensuring that the program is informed of cutting edge nutrition-specific and nutrition sensitive approaches as well as global best practices to inform the design and implementation of all aspects of the ASTUTE program. The Senior Advisor will serve as a mentor and global nutrition expert for ASTUTE team members, ensuring high quality implementation, data collection, and use of data for program improvement. He/she will serve as a technical resource for the MOH and other ministry counterparts for the GOT's strategy for reducing stunting and will play a key role, in collaboration with the Team Lead, M&E team and other
ASTUTE senior staff, in building local capacity for stunting reduction in the target areas.

Duties:
With the Team Lead, coordinate with GOT ministry counterparts, including the Prime Minister's Office, GOT Nutrition Coordination teams, regions and districts to design, roll out and monitor the impact of ASTUTE interventions
Serve as research coordinator for the ASTUTE program, overseeing all data collection, analysis, reporting, and use of findings, particularly from formative research implemented by various partners and at various levels and ensuring that these findings influence refinement of program strategies.
Develop and maintain strong relationships with UNICEF and relevant project partners to discuss best practices and collaboration opportunities, and ensure cross-learning and sharing of data, baseline, formative and monitoring results.
Develop and maintain relationships with key government stakeholders to secure buy-infer ASTUTE approaches, and to ensure that district and regional challenges and results are fed back up to the national level to inform policy development and refinement
Participate in the development and finalization of key deliverables including the ASTUTE Work Plan and M&E Planin conjunction with DFID and key partners
Participate in the writing of quarterly and annual reports ensuring high quality reporting and use of data
Participate in semi-annual and annual project reviews with DFID
Oversee conduct of a gender analysis to inform program strategies
Participate in quarterly work plan review meetings with National and Regional multi-sectoral government
stakeholders
Participate in national Nutrition-linked technical working groups and relevant coordination meetings
In coordination with partners, design and conduct formative research to inform the design of nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive interventions as part of ASTUTE's SBCC approach.
In coordination with partners, collaborate in the design and conduct of operations research to identity best approaches to solving challenges that may arise in the implementation of project activities.
Review project trainings i1nd toolbox to ensure it includes QA/QI Modules
Develop data documentation and review procedures
Oversee M&E component of the project ensuring quality assurance throughout, particularly baseline and end line data
Review and refine multi-method rapid formative research for SBCC assessment tools
Conduct baseline review of project indicators ensuring overall technical quality
Review monitoring and evaluation data on a quarterly basis and research findings as they become available during the life of the project
Make recommendations for modifying ASTUTE facility and community packages based on formative research

The position requires a competent and experienced person with the following attributes:

A minimum of 10 years' experience implementing international development projects, preferably in health
Demonstrated expertise in nutrition design and implementation of programs to reduce stunting, such as improve young child feeding, management of diarrhea disease and WASH interventions, and behavior change approaches.
Experience working directly with projects funded by DFID, UNICEF, USAID or CDC
Experience designing and building effective M&E plans including measures to maintain quality assurance
Experience designing and conducting research in Africa
Demonstrated expertise to mentor, train and build the capacity of local counterparts

APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS:

Interested applicants may submit their application together with photocopies of testimonials plus updated curriculum vitae through APPLY NOW below the e-mail subject must read. Senior Advisor for Research and Quality Assurance Email applications must be accompanied by a signed and scanned letter, the original of which will be required to be produced at the time of interview.
Or by mail: Applications must be in a sealed envelope addressed to the following:
Country Director
IMA World Health Tanzania
P.O. Box 9260
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Only short-listed applicants will be contacted.