Senior Manager, Restoration Monitoring and Data Insights

##World Resources Institute Careers

###Senior Manager, Restoration Monitoring and Data Insights

**Home FAQ Internships Senior Manager, Restoration Monitoring and Data Insights Data Analysis Technical Research Kigali Rwanda Print This Page Apply**

This position will be hybrid, requiring a few days per week in-office. You can be based in our office in Kigali, Nairobi, or Accra. WRI Africa Regional Office. Existing work authorization is required at the time of application submission as WRI is unable to sponsor any visa work sponsorship for this position.

###About the Program WRI's Global Restoration Initiative informs, enables, and invests in people that restore degraded land, converting them to socially, economically, and environmentally productive lands. WRI's restoration work in Africa supports the goals of the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) where, with other partners, we have identified more than 700 million hectares of cleared and degraded forest and agricultural lands suitable for restoration across Africa.

Since 2023, WRI is supporting landscape-focused restoration in three anchor landscapes in Africa: Ghana's Cocoa Belt, Kenya's Greater Rift Valley, and the Lake Kivu and Rusizi River basin in Burundi, DRC, and Rwanda. Done well, landscape-scale restoration can revitalize African landscapes while enhancing human well-being through food, energy, and water systems which conserve, restore, and sustain the continent's rich natural heritage while generating evidence for scaling within and across landscapes.

Restore Local is a WRI-led flagship project that contributes to realizing the goals of AFR100. The four-year project will work to restore Africa's vital landscapes by investing in locally led restoration at scale, providing local communities and businesses across the continent with the support they need to revitalize their landscapes. Restore Local will align its work with a four-part blueprint, creating training and mentorship opportunities, directly funding restoration champions, securing policies that reward farmers, and helping communities track their restoration progress with the right monitoring, reporting, and verification protocols. Collaborating with main partners and stakeholders, it will focus on delivering this blueprint in the three anchor landscapes and readying important infrastructure for replication and scaling across AFR100.

###Job Highlight Reporting to the Senior Manager of Africa Land Restoration and Senior Manager of Global Restoration Monitoring, you will help manage the operations of WRI's restoration monitoring and verification activities in AFR100. You will identify critical data and insights needs for Restore Local to demonstrate progress to donors, partners, and WRI leadership, leveraging the Inform team's latest data science innovations. You will design how geoscience data and data through social science and environmental science can be used to instill trust and credibility in Restore Local's progress. You will shape restoration monitoring activities at landscape, country, and continental scales, drawing links and learning lessons from existing monitoring and verification activities at TerraFund project scales. You will also contribute evaluation expertise and lead evaluation and impact assessments on various topics relevant to the Restore Local Project (i.e., restoration impact on food production, water supply, etc.).

As monitoring data is generated, you will work with the TerraMatch product and the Inform team to ensure that the needs of Restore Local user audiences are considered, which may require developing capacity development and knowledge products. You will build, nurture, and manage the African Inform team that provides technical support to landscapes, countries, and to the broader AFR100 partnership. You will engage WRI's Africa Restoration Executive Team (AFRET) on key decisions for the Inform team, support proposal development, and staffing plans for monitoring, evaluation, and learning activities, publications, reviews, training events, workshops, retreats, and other learning events.

###What will you do ####Strategy and Program Management (50%)

• Set the MRV vision for Restore Local team members to understand how existing geoscience data and research as well as socio-environmental science data and research contribute to highlighting progress in the Lake Kivu, Rusizi River Basin, the Greater Rift Valley, and the Ghana Cocoa Belt landscapes for donors, partners, and investors. This includes integrating gender and social equality, locally led adaptation, climate resilience into the indicator frameworks at project landscape, country, and continental scales.
• Lead discussions within WRI and with partners to scope potential evaluations, impact assessments.
• Nurture a culture of impact evaluation within WRI's inform team.
• Lead the continuous improvement processes for TerraFund MRV, Landscape, and Restore Local MRV to ensure learning across scales with a focus on improving accuracy and robustness of data, increasing the replicability and scalability of methods.
• Represent WRI by communicating the Restore Local MRV program vision with partners, including Realize Impact and One Tree Planted, and continue to build a working relationship on restoration monitoring with them.
• Develop and execute a plan for completing existing grant deliverables for WRI's target countries in AFR100.
• Manage delivery of restoration monitoring outputs which includes aligning with GRI's Objective and Key Results, setting priorities, and creating a culture of Asana use, achievement celebration, and accountability.
• Liaise with AFRET and Senior Manager of Global Restoration Monitoring to plan and run bi-annual data-backed pause, reflect, and learn moments that take stock of Restore Local's progress and inform adaptive management measures.

####Research Development and Innovation (30%)

• Define priorities for research development related to restoration MRV evaluation and impact assessment based on the needs of Restore Local at the project landscape and regional scales.
• Develop a plan with priorities and timelines to collaborate with internal and external experts to strengthen GRI's narrative of how restoration creates outcomes for cross-cutting issues: food, water security, biodiversity, climate, jobs, and livelihoods.
• Integrate diverse types of knowledge into research plans including local, Indigenous, experiential, cultural.
• Lead processes to identify Restore Local's impact metrics and to design appropriate quantitative methods.
• Lead or participate in field scoping and data gathering missions including interviews, focus groups, site visits, or other activities to identify evaluation elements or make recommendations for data collection methods.
• Conduct or oversee data analysis processes following best practices for robust analysis and documentation to interpret findings.
• Build and nurture partnerships with data providers, researchers, and monitoring evaluation and learning experts in Africa.
• Oversee field and/or sample-based data collection operations and recommend ways to improve operational efficiency.