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Position
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Associate Director --- Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning
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Location
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Delhi/Lucknow
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Reporting Officer
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Program Director, with a dotted Line to the Country Director
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Manages
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MEL team members, consultants, research partners, and crossfunctional coordination with programme and fundraising teams
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Type
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Full-Time
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Position Overview:
Milaan is looking for a AD – MERL who can lead the organisation’s monitoring, evaluation, research and learning vertical. This is a leadership role for someone who can build a strong evidence function for the organisation while remaining closely connected to programme implementation, organisational strategy, and fundraising priorities.
The AD should be able to engage confidently with technically rigorous organisations and partners working at the intersection of evidence, policy, and programme effectiveness, including research and evaluation institutions. The role also requires the ability to independently develop strong evidence-led proposals and technical submissions for donors that place a premium on MEL quality, outcomes measurement, evaluation strategy, and learning, including donors and funders whose decision-making is strongly shaped by evidence and rigor.
This role is senior enough to lead the function, represent Milaan externally on questions of evidence and evaluation, and guide internal decision-making on programme quality and learning. At the same time, it is not intended to be an excessively top-heavy research-director role; it is suited to a strong mid-careerto-senior professional who can combine rigour, practicality, and leadership in a resource-conscious organization.
About Milaan
Milaan is a non-profit organization that envisions an inclusive and equal world where every girl is educated, healthy, and safe. We believe in the power of movement building to challenge the social norms that reinforce gender inequality and rewrite the narratives that shape the day-to-day lives of women and girls.
Our primary work focuses on adolescent girls aged 10–19 from socially and economically marginalized communities. Milaan empowers them by addressing four critical dimensions:
- Completion of Secondary Education
- Enhanced Access to Information and Services on Adolescent Health
- Prevention of Child Marriage
- Prevention of Gender-Based Discrimination and Violence
- We are driven by values of empathy, respect, diversity, integrity, innovation, inclusion, and excellence in execution.
Responsibilities
Provide strategic leadership to the MEL function
- Build and maintain one organisation-wide results framework, with consistent indicator definitions across all programmes and geographies, that guides programme design internally and underpins every funder report externally.
- Shape the organisation’s approach to monitoring, evaluation, learning, and evidence use so that data supports both accountability and strategic decision-making.
- Ensure that MEL systems are aligned with programme design, organisational goals, donor commitments, and long-term scale ambitions.
- Supervise and mentor MEL team members and oversee external consultants, evaluators, and technical partners where required.
Strengthen research and evaluation quality
- Design and oversee assessments, baseline and endline studies, internal evaluations, contribution analysis, process tracing, or outcome harvesting to evidence institutional uptake and policy influence, where a clean counterfactual rarely exists.
- Provide high-quality technical input on measurement strategy around outcome indicators such as adolescent agency, voice and empowerment, and social-norm and behaviour change on sensitive topics such as gender based violence, so that these are measured with validated constructs and established methods rather than improvised proxies.
- Bring working fluency in statistics, quantitative reasoning, and applied research methods, with enough depth to engage credibly with research-focused institutions and evaluators.
- Guide the organisation on what level of evaluation is fit for purpose, and whether an outcome can credibly be attributed to Milaan's work.
Turn data into programme and strategy insight
- Critically analyse programme data and identify patterns, risks, gaps, and implications for implementation.
- Generate actionable feedback for programme teams on reach, quality, consistency, design fidelity, and performance improvement.
- Surface where assumptions may not be holding, where implementation may be drifting, and where course correction is needed.
- Support senior leadership to use evidence in decisions related to programme adaptation, scale, resource allocation, and organisational strategy.
Lead evidence-led donor positioning and proposal development
- Independently lead or significantly shape MEL-heavy sections of donor proposals, concept notes, technical narratives, and evaluation plans.
- Develop strong measurement frameworks, learning agendas, evaluation approaches, and outcome narratives for institutional donors and foundations.
- Help position Milaan for funders that expect high-quality evidence logic, measurable outcomes, clarity on learning, and sound thinking on impact and cost-effectiveness.
- Support donor conversations, reports, and presentations where programme evidence, results interpretation, and evaluation quality are central.
Represent the function internally and externally
- Serve as Milaan’s internal anchor on MEL and research, bringing clarity and credibility to discussions with programme, leadership, and fundraising teams.
- Represent the organisation in conversations with external evaluators, research institutions, technical agencies, and evidence-oriented funders.
- Build a culture in which MEL is treated as a strategic management function rather than a reporting or compliance exercise.
Ideal candidate profile
Milaan is likely to benefit most from a candidate who brings 10–12 years of relevant experience across monitoring and evaluation, applied research, data analysis, programme learning, and evidence use, preferably in the social sector, public policy, development, education, gender, adolescent wellbeing. The role needs regular presence in programme geographies and the ability to translate ground-level implementation realities into evidence that programme teams can act on and funders can trust.
The strongest candidate will combine technical depth with practical judgement. They should be comfortable with numbers, able to interrogate datasets and assumptions, experienced enough to manage complexity, and hold their own with senior donors, researchers, and programme leaders.
Qualifications and experience
- Master’s degree in economics, statistics, public policy, development studies, data science, sociology, education, or another relevant discipline.
- Strong grounding in quantitative methods, statistics, and research design; training in economics or econometrics would be a significant advantage.
- At least 10–12 years of relevant professional experience in MEL, research, evaluation, analytics, or evidence use.
- Demonstrated experience leading or managing a function, vertical, workstream, or team rather than contributing only as an individual technical specialist.
- Meaningful experience designing or managing MEL systems and research studies in complex programme settings.
- Experience engaging with external evaluators, research agencies, or evidence-focused institutions.
- Demonstrated ability to write or lead donor proposals where MEL and evidence strategy are central.
- Experience in education, gender, youth development, health, livelihoods, or other human development sectors would be valuable.
Core skills
- Strong command of monitoring frameworks, indicators, learning systems, and data quality processes.
- Ability to interpret quantitative data with rigour, scepticism, and sound judgement.
- Familiarity with statistics, survey design, sampling logic, and evaluation methods.
- Ability to engage confidently with technically strong external stakeholders, including research organisations and evaluators.
- Strong writing skills for proposals, donor communication, analytical notes, and internal learning documents.
- Comfort with Excel and at least one analytical tool such as Stata, R, SPSS, or Python
- Ability to balance rigour with practicality in implementation-heavy, resource-conscious environments.
- Ability to lead across teams without losing operational grounding.
How to Apply
Please send your updated CV along with a cover letter briefly highlighting your suitability for the position to careers@milaan.in, with the subject line "Application for Associate Director – MERL."
The compensation for this position will be determined based on the candidate's skills, qualifications, and years of relevant experience.
Equal Opportunity Employer: Milaan is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applications from individuals of all backgrounds, irrespective of age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, disability, or sexual orientation. All applications will be evaluated based on merit.