Consultant - Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning

Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Consultancy

Background

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; the Ghana’s Cocoa Belt, the 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 key 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.

TerraFund for AFR100 is an investment program, channeling funding to locally led African community-based non-profits and businesses in AFR100. Since 2024, TerraFund is providing finance for 92 growing organizations that are restoring land in the three target landscapes.

Scope of work

This 6-month consultancy was developed to put the foundations in place for establishing a monitoring, reporting, evaluation, and learning practice for Restore Local. The team hopes that by establishing an overarching monitoring framework for Restore Local and starting to understand data gaps and skills needs, we can hire appropriate team members to continue to build upon the practice and start to track restoration progress in a synchronized direction at the TerraFund project, landscape, country, and continental scales.

The consultant will report to the Senior Manager for Africa Restoration and Senior Manager of Global Restoration Monitoring. They will collaborate with many teams at WRI, including Restore Local, TerraFund, Inform, and Managing for Results. The consultant will complete the following activities:

Activity 1. Define the scope of a Monitoring Evaluation and Learning plan for Restore Local at project, landscape and regional scales. Define what success looks like to have data, information and holistic narrative outcomes for WRI’s restoration work at those scales. Document consensus of that success and communicate widely.

Activity 2. Lead processes to develop a theory of change for Restore Local program[1] (Capacity, Capital, Enable, Monitoring-Reporting-Verification and associated partnerships) at the Restore Local program level across landscapes and at each landscape level (Greater Rift Valley, Lake Kivu & Rusizi Landscape and the Ghana Cocoa Belt). Both scales should be within the scope of the Restore Local program.

Activity 3. Lead processes for developing Restore Local’s overarching monitoring framework at the Restore Local program level and landscape levels.

Activity 4. Lead processes to develop lists of key indicators (required and optional) to track WRI’s progress in realizing the theory of change for Restore Local program (Capacity, Capital, Enable, Monitoring-Reporting-Verification) and highlight potential variations at the landscape level.

Activity 5. Identify and recommend how to fill existing internal capacity needs and partnership opportunities in order to operationalize Restore Local’s monitoring framework to achieve success as defined.

Activity 6. Create a data collection plan or indicator reference sheet for all of Restore Local’s required indicators, including data sources, baseline processes and frequency of data collection.

Activity 7. Propose a system for Restore Local’s data storage, data management system, and dissemination plans that facilitate cross-teams collaboration and information sharing with key stakeholders at the regional, landscape and project scales.

Activity 8. Identify Restore Local’s MEL research topics in close consultation with AFR100 Research Lead.

Activity 9. Design an outline of one knowledge or communication product on multiscale monitoring, evaluation and learning, documenting lessons learned from defining MEL plan for Restore Local.

Activity 10. Communicating progress and final results to the team.

‘Deliverables