Consultant - Strategic Program Support, Resilience Pathways and Implementation - Remote/Kenya

Background:

Mercy Corps is a leading global organization powered by the belief that a better world is possible. In disaster, in hardship, in more than 40 countries around the world, we partner to put bold solutions into action — helping people triumph over adversity and build stronger communities from within.

Mercy Corps and its consortium partners are implementing a five-year USAID/Food for Peace funded program entitled Nawiri in Turkana and Samburu Counties of Kenya focused on nutrition resilience. The program aims to sustainably reduce persistent acute malnutrition in the two counties over a five-year period using a multi-sectoral program approach that integrates resilient livelihoods, access to improved water, health, and sanitation services, and strengthening enabling systems for nutrition from household to national level. Nawiri has dedicated the first two years (Phase 1) to implementing an action research agenda to inform the program design to achieve the program’s goal in the remaining three years (Phase 2). The program is currently embarking on an ambitious implementation plan to layer and integrate a series of interventions that address both immediate and systemic drivers of acute malnutrition, while addressing the effects of extreme drought and the global food crisis in implementation areas.  Throughout all stages, the program is working closely with government, community, and private sector partners.

Purpose / Project Description:

The Nawiri program is beginning to scale implementation to 35 wards, while preparing for its Year 5 PREP and a three-year cost extension. The initial implementation of the program revealed opportunities for greater synergies across program components, as well as more refined and coherent models around how we support key population segments with a tailored, comprehensive package of support, and how the proposed models link to a clear monitoring and learning plan that supports program adaptations. In order to facilitate program improvements for Year 5, the Nawiri team is looking for support in the following areas:

• Clear definition of refined and accessible program logic (resilience pathways) related to nutrition resilience linked to key population groups and their households
• Clear logic for how we build and sustain access to resilience capacities for target households through the program’s cross-cutting components (also called work packages) related to resilient livelihoods, nutrition social services, livelihood skills, social behavior change, among others.
• Capture and documentation of program logic and related interventions in to clearly accessible and usable formats that enable the improvements of implementation strategies and support learning
• Improvements in implementation strategy formats based on outputs from program logic, and review of key implementation strategies
• Support in translating improvements implementation strategies into adaptive workplans

Consultant Objectives:

The purpose of the consultancy is to:

• Provide expertise into resilience-informed program logic, implementation strategies and adaptive workplanning in preparation for PREP 5
• Co-facilitate sessions that advance program standard practices in resilience and ensure capacity-sharing across teams
• Document outputs and learning from process in usable and understandable format to support future work planning and implementation by technical and implementation teams

Consultant Activities:

The Consultant will:

• Co-develop and support the design of an overall process and facilitation plan for Nawiri’s efforts to tighten program logic, implementation strategies, and workplanning processes to enable adaptive management and learning for collective nutrition resilience program impact. The consultant works closely with a Nawiri SLA and technical team to create and plan a facilitated process, with clear templates and examples of outputs.. The consultant advises on incorporation of best practices in resilience program cycle management to enhance the facilitation and outputs. The process should clearly inform Nawiri’s PREP 5 and learning plan:
  • Review existing program documents to understand and assess how they can inform the facilitation plan. These include: draft program strategies, anchor group guidance/handbooks and program strategy framing documents related to refining program logic, and articulating program approaches.
  • Support the design of a facilitation plan to refine program logic/nutrition resilience pathways around key target populations, linked to anchor groups (GIRL, Adapted Mother 2 Mother Support, REAP 4 Nutrition, BOY, Producer Groups). This should include finalizing prepared “generic” program logic pathways for population groups, anchored in strengthening access and use of resilience capacities towards nutrition resilience.
  • Participate in the design of and help consolidate an example of expected outputs from program logic refinement as a key facilitation tool.
  • Provide technical review of  and help finalize facilitation tools and templates for documentation and capturing knowledge effectively for program planning and implementation Deliverable:
    • Written inputs / feedback into agendas, facilitation plan and process design / approach
    • Prepped program logic pathways around population group with clear framework
    • Facilitation plan for reviewing program logic and moving from population based program logic to household and systems pathways
    • Support tools and templates for knowledge capture
• Co-facilitate mini workshops / working sessions and assist with workshop knowledge capture. This includes facilitating sessions, assisting with resilience approach integration, supporting agenda redesigns as needed and assisting the facilitation team with documentation in tools and templates during sessions. More specifically:
  • co-facilitate the refinement of program logic around population groups and cross-cutting strategies (i.e. resilient livelihoods, water systems integration)
  • Support the documentation and consolidation of logic into usable and understandable formats that teams will support teams in thinking through implementation strategies and learning plans.
  • Facilitate review of SOP templates to facilitate integration of program logic and additional considerations related to targeting and work planning.
  • The consultant will travel to Nairobi to deliver this work.
• Deliverable:
  • Co-facilitation of workshops / work sessions
  • Documentation/capture of workshop decisions, key data
  • Refinement of facilitation strategies
  • On-going data capture
• Organize and consolidate knowledge from the workshops to feed into technical outputs for Y5 / cost extension planning and R-CLA systems
  • Work with the Strategic Learning Lead to synthesize outputs from the workshop, ensuring the outputs are designed to intentionally feed into workplan development and contribute to Nawiri’s implementation needs for strategic CLA systems for resilience. The consultant will deliver the majority of this work while in country.
• Deliverable:
  • Updated program logic - each pathway separately documented and finalized in a usable format, accessible for reflection and learning.
  • Recommendations for updating SOPs
  • Synthesized learning for PREP 5 implications for each component/program strategic area
• Produce a synthesis brief that documents and highlights Nawiri’s overarching process/ steps followed for workplan design using a resilience approach to support Nawiri’s knowledge management. This will be a working document that Nawiri/Mercy Corps will finalize and polish later into a technical learning brief.
• Deliverable:
  • Rapid synthesis brief highlighting steps in process and where appropriate, pulling in examples

Consultant Deliverables:

• Preparation Deliverables
  • Written inputs / feedback into agendas, facilitation plan and process design / approach
  • Prepped program logic pathways around population group and cross-cutting strategy
  • Support tools and templates for knowledge capture
• Co-facilitation Deliverables:
  • Co-facilitation of workshops / work sessions
  • Documentation/capture of workshop decisions, key data
  • Refinement of facilitation strategies
  • On-going data capture
• Product/Post-Workshop Deliverables:
  • Updated program logic - each pathway separately documented and finalized in a usable format, accessible for reflection and learning.
  • Recommendations for updating SOPs
  • Synthesized learning for PREP 5 implications for each component/program strategic area
  • Rapid synthesis brief highlighting steps in process and where appropriate, pulling in examples

Timeframe / Schedule:

• Remote preparation and input into facilitation plan and prepped program logic for outcome groups: February 10 - 14 (5 days)
• In country preparation and input: February 16 - 19 (finalize facilitation and program logic) (4 days)
• In country facilitation of workshops/work sessions and consolidation of outputs: February 20 - March 5 (14)
• Remote follow up and learning brief development: due March 25th (4 days)
  • Maximum number of remote days: 9
  • Maximum number of in country days including travel days: 18
  • Total: 27 days

The Consultant will report to:

Strategic Learning Advisor

The Consultant will work closely with:  Program Quality lead,DCoP, Technical Team Member, learning partner RTI

Required Experience & Skills:

• MA or MS preferred in a relevant field
• At least 7 years of experience in resilience technical work, which must include experience with food security development programs in international contexts
• Demonstrated experience creating and facilitating resilience logic technical design sessions in a development programming context using adult learning methods
• Demonstrated experience developing materials to improve program-level adaptive management / CLA systems (collaborating, learning and adapting)
• Excellent cross-cultural facilitation skills.
• Excellent English writing skills.

**Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
**Achieving our mission begins with how we build our team and work together. Through our commitment to enriching our organization with people of different origins, beliefs, backgrounds, and ways of thinking, we are better able to leverage the collective power of our teams and solve the world’s most complex challenges. We strive for a culture of trust and respect, where everyone contributes their perspectives and authentic selves, reaches their potential as individuals and teams, and collaborates to do the best work of their lives.

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**Equal Employment Opportunity
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**Safeguarding & Ethics
**Mercy Corps team members are expected to support all efforts toward accountability, specifically to our stakeholders and to international standards guiding international relief and development work, while actively engaging communities as equal partners in the design, monitoring and evaluation of our field projects. Team members are expected to conduct themselves in a professional manner and respect local laws, customs and MC's policies, procedures, and values at all times and in all in-country venues.