MERL Officer - Maternal and Child Nutrition Programme

About the role

Save the Children in Laos, with support from UNICEF and in close coordination with the Ministry of Health, is running a multi-year Wasting Prevention and Treatment Programme to improve maternal and child nutrition across 11 high-burden provinces. The MERL Officer works closely with the National Impact Manager to provide monitoring, evaluation, research, accountability and learning support to field project teams, ensuring regular onsite and offsite monitoring, timely data collection, analysis and reporting.

Key responsibilities

• Develop the field-level MEAL plan with the Project Manager and National Impact Manager, and carry out monitoring using Quality Benchmarks, maintaining action plans and following up on them.
• Help create monitoring tools on Kobo Toolbox, perform onsite verification of activity and output data, and collect beneficiary feedback.
• Maintain the Total Reach count, beneficiary database, distribution tracker and project highlights and challenges.
• Produce field monitoring reports, support the PRIME system data updates and prepare provincial progress reports for IMC meetings.
• Support baseline, midterm and end-of-project evaluations, ensure ethical standards, record lessons learned and build provincial profiles.
• Ensure communities and health centres have access to project information and feedback channels, and conduct periodic quality monitoring visits.
• Network with provincial and district government, implementing partners and MEAL forums, and represent the organisation in meetings.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in social science, computer science, statistics or a related field, or relevant M&E experience.
• At least two years' experience in monitoring and evaluation, research or related fields, including implementing MERL systems at sector level.
• Understanding of child rights, gender equality and climate change components.
• Fluent in English; women with or an interest in STEM are strongly encouraged to apply.

Required skills

• SPSS, MS Excel, MS Power BI, Kobo Toolbox, MS Access and MS PowerPoint.
• Strong analytical, report writing, communication and organisational skills.