Role: Social Impact Measurement Fellow
Venture: Engineers Without Borders, Monitoring & Evaluation Team
Location: Flexible – either Kampala or Accra
Deadline: July 14, 2019
About Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB)
EWB is a free-thinking charitable organization that brings people and ideas together to tackle the most crucial causes of poverty and inequality. We nurture talent and leadership, enable social entrepreneurship and advocate for policy innovations to cross-breed systems-changing innovations to ensure economic and public opportunity reaches everyone, including the most underserved and marginalized populations, especially women and girls.
Through our leadership curriculum and Fellowships Program, we offer experiential learning opportunities in Canada and sub-Saharan Africa to launch future shapers equipped to understand and re-engineer complex social systems. For more information, visit ewb.ca.
About Engineers Without Borders Monitoring & Evaluation Team
Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) Team is responsible for measuring the outcomes of key areas of the organization’s work, especially the outcomes of our Volunteer Cooperation Program (VCP) project with Global Affairs Canada and our social impact investments. As a seed-stage investor, we are working to determine the best fit for purpose when it comes to evaluation. Currently we are piloting a transformative “Africa-made” evaluation in partnership with the African Evaluation Association, Donna Mertens, and venture partner M-Shule to determine ways to deepen beneficiary voice in our social impact measurement process. The VCP project evaluation includes the measurement of the results of our volunteer sending programs, venture development and venture-driven innovation, sector-based innovations, leadership skills development (Kumvana Fellows), and mobilization of Canadians around international development.
EWB is a learning organization where program evaluation is highly valued for its use in data-driven decision making, program improvement, and accountability to ultimate beneficiaries.
EWB’s overall approach to evaluation typically involves mixed methods, triangulation of data, and retrospective and longitudinal data collection. We are currently in the process of developing core evaluation principles to guide evaluation work across the organization. While still in development, they will be based on EWB’s Core Values. See the table below for how these values are being translated into evaluation principles.
| EWB Core Value | Description | Application in Evaluation |
| Strive for Humility | We learn by being open – open to new ideas from anywhere and anyone, and open about our mistakes. | Hire and collaborate with local evaluators wherever possible; Use local evaluation approaches and methods (e.g. Made in Africa evaluation); Commit to meta-evaluation. |
| Address Root Causes for Impact | We start by clearly defining the impact that we want to help bring about, and then think through the complexity of social change so that our actions target root causes. | Adhere to the Accuracy standards of the Program Evaluation Standards from the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation to ensure our results are an accurate representation of our impact; Involve stakeholders in the development of evaluation questions, evaluation purpose, and analysis and use of data. |
| Dream Big & Work Hard | We strive to make the impossible possible, through a combination of imagination, hard work, innovation, passion, and a willingness to take risks. | Find creative ways to engage stakeholders throughout the evaluation process; innovate where necessary to create evaluations that fit the context and needs of each scenario. |
| Invest in People | We know that true change will require a movement of socially-minded leaders. We support and invest in each other to help build this movement together. | Utilize empowerment evaluation methods and provide evaluation training to capacity-build where appropriate; Seek to provide evaluation contracts, jobs, and other opportunities to evaluators from marginalized communities. |
| Courageously Commit | All change begins within ourselves. We commit to personal growth through regular self-assessment and have the courage ask for feedback. | Use transformative and culturally-responsive evaluation techniques to promote self-reflection and self-assessment with respect to our power and privilege as evaluators. |
| Ask Tough Questions | We only improve when we ask tough questions about our past, present, and future work to determine if we are having the maximum impact for beneficiaries. | Take the time to develop thoughtful evaluation questions in collaboration with stakeholders; work with project teams and stakeholders to analyze data. |
| Our Bottom Line: We put beneficiaries first | We strive to do what they would advise us to. We help bring their voice into the rooms where they need to be heard. We stay independent to be able to stay true to their interests. | Utilize transformative, culturally-responsive, participatory, and other similar evaluation methods whenever possible. |
About Strategy & Investment Team
EWB Ventures is a new seed-stage investment vehicle backed by Engineers Without Borders Canada. We are dedicated to supporting early-stage, highly scalable, innovative, for-profit, social enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa. We make tailored, long-term investments of up to $100,000 in ventures with high potential to drive systemic change for the benefit of the underserved in new, untested ways.
About You
EWB invests financial and human capital in seed-stage social businesses that have the potential to address root causes of poverty. Social impact measurement (SIM) is one of the defining features of impact investing, and is especially challenging at the seed-stage, where household level data is difficult to acquire. However, seed-stage businesses are also uniquely poised to pivot their business models based on beneficiary and client feedback, meaning effective evaluation is particularly critical at this stage.
While many tools, resources, and literature have been developed, SIM is still a relatively new space. This provides an opportunity for the SIM Fellow to innovate and contribute to the development of an emerging sector. Currently, EWB is finalizing a new evaluation plan to measure the social return on our investment portfolio. The role of the SIM Fellow will be to implement this evaluation plan, while simultaneously conducting meta-evaluation to iterate on and improve our evaluation design. The role is highly entrepreneurial and innovative – requiring the Fellow to implement and improve on evaluation approach that is right-sized for the impact investing space (and the S&I team) while also providing the necessary data for the S&I Team and EWB Ventures’ seed-stage entrepreneurs to make decisions.
While technically a member of the Monitoring & Evaluation Team, the Fellow will be fully integrated into the S&I Team to enable a deep understanding of EWB’s investment model and evaluation context, while being managed remotely by EWB’s Impact Evaluation and Learning Manager who is based at the national office in Toronto.
This opportunity is tailored to candidates looking to make an impact in shaping a highly innovative model in disrupting poverty, contributing to the SIM community, and de-risking seed-stage ventures through SIM. We are looking for someone who has the courage to question the status quo and ask difficult questions, yet has the humility to listen and commit to personal growth through honest self-assessment. The most suitable candidate is someone who has a background in quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods, experience working with marginalized groups, and a demonstrated ability to work in an East or West African context.
As a SIM Fellow for the S&I Team, your responsibilities will include:
- Work closely with the S&I Team to understand and contribute to the development of the EWB investment model using evaluative data;
- Implement the impact measurement and management evaluation plan;
- Review the quality of existing data collected from EWB ventures, the methods of collecting it, and the degree to which the data can be aggregated and/or provide baseline statistics for impact evaluation;
- Provide text and key findings to the EWB Communications Team to use in communications pieces;
- Collect and analyze Fellow Learning Capture data;
- Implement S&I Team data collection, analysis and reporting for compliance with EWB’s Volunteer Cooperation Program grant;
- Facilitate S&I Team learning and improvement using evaluation results;
- Develop evaluation infrastructure and resources for EWB as directed by the Impact Evaluation & Learning Manager;
- Represent EWB at SIM events in your African region, such as events hosted by the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs.
Sound exciting? Here’s who we are looking for.
Skills & Qualifications
Required:
- Passion for evaluation and commitment to alleviating poverty;
- 3+ years of professional experience in program evaluation, impact evaluation or social impact measurement; or graduate education in evaluation methods, economics, public health, sociology, research methods or similar social science;
- Intellectual curiosity and a strong desire to learn;
- Some analytical and quantitative skills, such as descriptive statistics;
- Some qualitative data collection and analysis skills, such as interviews;
- Familiarity with mixed methods research;
- Demonstrated ability to work autonomously.
Preferred:
- Experience living/working in a developing economy – East or West Africa a big plus;
- Graduate degree;
- Experience with statistical software (R or Stata a plus);
- Familiarity with participatory research or transformative evaluation;
- Experience with survey design and implementation, interviews, data cleaning and data management.
Application Inquiries
- For inquiries about the EWB Fellowship experience, please contact: fellowrecruitment@ewb.ca
- For inquiries about the role with EWB M&E Team, please contact: Courtney Bolinson
Application Instructions
For further details, please refer to our website.
