Monitoring Specialist

**Job no**: 558772

**Contract type**: Fixed Term Appointment

**Duty Station**: Panama City

**Level**: P-4

**Location**: Panama

**Categories**: Research, Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation

UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

**For every child, **_knowledge_**

Monitoring will remain at the center of LAC Regional Office’s ability to support programmatic excellence and accelerate achievement of results for children across all priority areas. The office will do this through four main areas of focus:
1. Work with UNICEF regional office and country offices to ensure the use of best practices when collecting data and doing analysis on the situation of children, as well as when using evidence for the implementation of their programs. This involves, among other things, exploiting novel data sources for insights, supporting performance monitoring, and supporting situation monitoring.

2. Promote the measurement and use of children data as an important topic to be pursued in the region. For this, the office will continue working across regional fora and national partners to produce analysis, diagnosis, guidelines, and strategies to increase the region’s capacity to both measure SDGs and understand best practices to achieve them.

3. Providing direct support to monitoring efforts in humanitarian contexts. This involves setting up integrated monitoring systems to streamline the data collection, analysis, report process. In addition, the office is also exploring the use of novel data sources gather further insights during humanitarian situations.

4. Providing direct support to countries’ monitoring efforts. This is done through direct technical assistance and regional workshops on best practices to monitor children and adolescents data.

**How can you make a difference?**

Under the general guidance of the Regional Chief of Programme and Planning, the Monitoring Specialist will:
1. Provide guidance and assistance to LAC country offices to ensure they have useful, reliable data and analysis on the situation of children and women’s rights and the performance of UNICEF - supported programmes including their relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability.

2. Assist in the development of the regional office and country office capacities for monitoring and research, with special attention to ensuring data is properly utilized to gain insights and evidence on the situation of children and women in the region.

3. Define and guide the region’s research agenda in order to ensure that data is used for evidence generation on what works and doesn’t work to ensure the rights of children and adolescents.

4. Provide leadership, advise, and support UNICEF regional office and country offices on best practices to use and analyze existing data, with special attention on ways to combine different sources of information, including administrative date, to gain further insights on the situation of children in the region.

5. Work within the UNSDG to support UN goals for delivering valid and reliable information on the attainment of the SDGs and other goals, and on the performance of UN-supported programmes.

6. In collaboration with local and regional partners, to provide support and oversight for specific technical projects, sectoral activities.

**Key functions, accountabilities and related tasks**:
1. Research Planning
- Lead the design of the regional knowledge agenda, with special attention to the production of methodologically sound, high quality work, that can generalizable across the region.
- Implementation and quality assurance of knowledge products (including ethical review, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches).
- Dissemination and exchange of knowledge (internal and external), including mechanisms to ensure that knowledge is readily available for decision makers.

2. Monitoring Planning
- Lead efforts to strengthen and improve the use of novel data sources, such as administrative data, to monitor and analyze the situation of children and adolescents in the region.
- Develop a collectively owned Situation Monitoring and Assessment system which supports the preparation of country level statistical and analytic reports on the status of children’s and women’s rights issues.
- Lead efforts to streamline the production and use of programme performance monitoring data in the region, including monitoring in humanitarian situations.

3. Situation Analysis and Monitoring
- Support the collection of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) and other key social development indicators to improve national planning.
- Support partners in the establishment and management of national statistical database