Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Advisor

Department: Programme Services

Department detail: M4D

GSMA Entity: Foundation

Location: Remote

Position type:  Short-term Contract

About the GSMA

The GSMA represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, uniting more than 750 operators with almost 400 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem, including handset and device makers, software companies, equipment providers and internet companies, as well as organisations in adjacent industry sectors. Our mission is to further the strategic, commercial, technological, developing world and advocacy interests of our members. The GSMA produces industry-leading events such as Mobile World Congress, Mobile World Congress Shanghai, Mobile World Congress Americas and the Mobile 360 Series conferences.

Every day we work to harness the power of mobile to achieve our industry purpose – Connecting Everyone and Everything to a Better Future – through four main activities:

• We provide strategic direction and thought leadership to our members
• We drive collaborative industry programmes aimed at maintaining operator relevance in the digital world
• We advocate for the industry to regulators, policy makers and society as a whole
• We convene the broad mobile communications ecosystem at our industry leading events

About the Team

The Mobile for Development (M4D) team drives innovation in digital technology to reduce inequalities in our world. Singularly positioned at the intersection of the mobile ecosystem and the development sector, we stimulate digital innovation to deliver both sustainable business and large-scale socio-economic impact for the underserved.

Our unique research and insights platform advances digital innovations and implementations that empower underserved populations to build a better future. Our in-market expertise informs partnerships between the mobile industry, tech innovators, governments and the development sector. And our unparalleled convening power motivates conversations and inspires action.

To date, we have impacted the lives of more than 120 million people.

The Central Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) team aims to support the Mobile for Development department with consistent, meaningful and exciting M&E methodologies and results. Our goal is to use these methods to evidence our contribution to social, environmental and commercial outcomes and impact; while also contributing towards adaptive management of projects and programmes. We rely on support from expert contractors, and close consultation and collaboration with programme teams to provide end to end M&E support with a utilisation focus. Managing the collection and analysis of data, and communicating results is central to our work.

The central M&E team is currently restructuring, with an aim to include M&E Senior Manager and Managers to support our key learning areas (Innovation, Digital Inclusion, Climate, Humanitarian Innovation and Financial Inclusion), as well as supporting analysts. The MEL Hub Director will support this new structure from the centre of a hub and spokes design, and help the department to accommodate this structure.

What the hiring manager says

About the Role

The MEL Advisor will lead the development and implementation of a comprehensive MEL strategy for an M4D programme, ensuring alignment with the broader M4D-wide MEL strategy. Working closely with the Director of MEL and M4D leadership, the MEL Advisor will play a central role in steering programme-level MEL activities, supporting the MEL team to deliver high-quality analysis and reporting, and overseeing key impact studies and strategic learning initiatives. This includes guiding the design and execution of impact assessments and learning agendas, translating evidence into insights, and ensuring MEL activities advance M4D’s overall impact and learning goals.

Responsibilities

As the MEL Advisor you will:

• Manage MEL within the programme team, developing a first-in-class MEL strategy, fostering a culture of learning and designing and executing an evolving learning agenda
• Oversee the implementation of a coherent MEL framework across projects and thematic areas, ensuring consistent standards, robust data use, and cross-learning within the programme and M4D-wide.
• Support and mentor programme-level MEL staff to strengthen delivery, build capacity, and maintain high-quality learning outputs.
• Lead on the design, commissioning, and oversight of key impact studies and evaluations, ensuring they produce actionable insights and support portfolio-level learning.
• Develop and take forward MEL assets for the programme team, leveraging the Central MEL team and promoting evidence-based decision-making, impact, and learning within the programme team, across M4D, and to external audiences
• Drive and publicise MEL excellence in M4D, internally and externally

About You

The successful candidate will have most or all of the following:

• Experience managing teams to deliver excellent MEL
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills to bring together busy internal and external teams with different needs and approaches at all levels, across diverse cultures and geographies
• Experience in designing and delivering MEL frameworks and evaluation approaches, and developing tools and approaches to support their team to do the same
• Experience reporting to donors including FCDO, DFAT, Sida, GIZ
• Competency with quantitative and qualitative data, and the ability to oversee and utilise databases stored in SQL, Excel and Google sheets, and Dedoose, with support from the M&E team
• Experience bringing together and sharing evidence which demonstrates a triple bottom line impact, across social, commercial and environmental metrics, including digital and ideally sectors which are relevant to M4D (including telecoms, digital and financial inclusion, utilities, agriculture, humanitarian)
• Motivation to drive evidence-driven decision making and co-develop new ways of working across the department

Contract type

Short term Contractor

Worker type

Contingent Worker

What We Offer

Working at the GSMA offers you unparalleled access to the mobile industry. We offer a chance to truly shape the direction of mobile, whatever your role. By joining the GSMA, you will be exposed to a fast-paced rapidly evolving environment, working on global solutions, genuinely fascinating and industry-changing projects and a stimulating and dynamic environment designed to enable you to flourish.

In addition to architect-designed offices and competitive compensation, our benefits include fantastic learning & development opportunities, generous holiday allowances, four additional days off for professional development and many others.

To learn more about the GSMA, visit our career site, our LinkedIn page and our Twitter page.

Being You at the GSMA

We care deeply about diversity, equity and inclusivity and aspire to be the best at it. Your well-being and work/life balance is important, so flexi-time and remote working is available to all staff. We're keen to ensure everyone is equal, represented and connected so we particularly encourage applications from all demographics. The sucess of the GSMA year on year will continue to be contributed by people from all walks of life.

GSMA Values

Our values not only drive our culture – they shape how we work and interact inside and outside our global organisation.

Passionately driven

We approach everything we do with unparalleled capability, tenacity and commitment, knowing that the challenging scale, pace and complexity of our work is what leads to its world-changing impact.

Insightful leaders

We continually develop and engage our expertise, insight and creativity so that we’re always ready to respond to the changing landscape with authority, agility and nuance.

Stronger together

We lean on each other so the industry can lean on us, embracing our diversity by actively seeking out perspectives and skill sets beyond our own, fuelling each other’s successes and constantly asking how we can help.

Underpinning our values is our collective mindset to show up purposefully as good human beings every day, in every situation. When we’re at our best – we are collaborative, considerate and compassionate to others, and we create a safe space for one another to thrive, assuming positive intent in our colleagues. And if we aren’t at our best and the pressure is on – we feel free to be ourselves but still remain curious, lean into the tough stuff and we are always respectful to others and accountable for the part we play.