Surveillance, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer – Malaria

PATH is a global nonprofit dedicated to achieving health equity. With more than 40 years of experience forging multisector partnerships and with expertise in science, economics, technology, advocacy, and dozens of other specialties, PATH develops and scales up innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing heath challenges.

PATH works with national malaria control programs in Africa to scale up interventions to reduce the burden of malaria, as well as to generate evidence and support planning for new strategies to accelerate elimination. The focus is on improving the collection, reporting and use of malaria surveillance data to enable rapid, accurate and rational decision-making to maximize the impact of interventions.

As part of its support to the Ministry of Public Health through its growing malaria portfolio in DRC, PATH is currently recruiting a Surveillance, M&E Officer who will be part of the MACEPA team. S/He will support the coordination, technical and implementation of surveillance and M&E activities related to the MACEPA project at Haut-Katanga province. The Surveillance and M&E Officer will work under the direct supervision of the Provincial Surveillance and M&E Advisor based at Lubumbashi (Haut-Katanga).

This position aims to support the reinforcement of the provincial and health zone’s malaria interventions and data culture through MACEPA’s scope.

Responsibilities:

• Provide technical support to the provincial MoH’s thematic groups related to malaria surveillance, monitoring and evaluation, case management and specific interventions (SMC and CCM) in collaboration with NMCP partners.
• Provide technical support to provincial MoH to strengthen staff capacity at the provincial, health zone and health facility levels in malaria data management.
• Support the provincial NMCP and HMIS in the implementation of malaria data quality assurance’s activities.
• Develop approaches to ensure the effectiveness of the quality of the outlier and/or data quality investigation’s processes at health zone level.
• Support provincial NMCP and HMIS, and the 27 health zone management teams on the monthly analysis of the consistency of malaria cases and deaths and the follow-up of the implementation of post-analysis actions. Document the root-causes of data discrepancies.
• Test innovative tools to build data culture at provincial and health zone levels.
• Develop annual provincial malaria technical briefs.
• Provide technical support to the monthly monitoring meetings at health zone and health area levels.
• Support the implementation of innovative approaches to reinforce the malaria data culture at sub-national level (provincial, health zone and health area levels).
• Strengthen the capacity of health zone management teams to verify the quality of data encoding in DHIS2 (DHIS2 vs. RMA).
• Support the provincial MoH/NMCP in the implementation of malaria data champion’s initiative and documentation of the process,
• Support the reinforcement of the provincial malaria data analysis and review’s existing platforms.
• Support the implementation and documentation of collaboration, learning and adaptation approaches in the implementation of interventions.
• Support the documentation of the project’s data to action (D2A) framework.

Leadership and Management:

• Support the provincial MoH (NMCP and HMIS),
• Strengthen the synergy of actions and collaboration between malaria technical partners at the provincial level,
• Assist the SM&E Advisor to prepare the provincial work plans, activity budgets and monitor work plan performance,
• Support the documentation of project implementation (risk, challenges and best practices).

Required Skills & Experience

• Bachelors in Epidemiologic, Nursing, Statistics, Information Management, Demography, Social Sciences, or related field.
• Minimum 3 years’ experience in Surveillance, Monitoring and Evaluation of infectious diseases.
• Prior capacity building experiences
• Understanding of DRC health information system
• Familiarity with the national DHIS2
• Experience in health data life-cycle management
• Experience in health data quality assurance’s management
• Knowledge in project performance’s measurement and management
• Excellent verbal, interpersonal and written communication skills.
• Fluency in French,
• Ability to work with minimum supervision.
• Ability to advocate, negotiate with the provincial and health zone management teams,
• Prior experience working in health malaria program/project, disease surveillance or health information systems,
• Excellent problem-solving skills with ability to analyze situations, identify existing or potential problems and recommend solutions,
• Knowledge/experience in implementing M&E systems,
• Knowledge in performance measurement, including indicator selection, target setting, reporting, database management, and developing M&E and performance monitoring plans,
• Experience in using data collection and reporting tools,
• Knowledge/experience in data quality management,
• Team player with the ability to work in a fast-paced environment,
• Ability to be flexible to handle multiple priorities and to work limited overtime as necessary,
• Outstanding professionalism in providing support, including ability to exercise good judgment, discretion, tact, and diplomacy,
• Superior interpersonal skills including courtesy, professionalism, and a cooperative attitude,
• Proficiency in MS Office package (Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel) and Knowledge of one of statistical software Epi Info, Stata, R or Tableau Software.