**INOVASI 3 - Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL) Officer****Project Overview and Role**:Indonesia's Vision 2045 sets the goal for Indonesia to transition from a resource-based economy towards an advanced service, technology, and knowledge-based economy by the centenary of its independence (2045). The 2025-2045 National Long Term Development Plan emphasises the urgency of Indonesia's human resource development to fully realise 2045 goals.Faced however with persistent low student performance that is emblematic of a learning crisis, significant improvement in student learning will be required to reach Indonesia's 2045 goals. Government of Indonesia (GoI) has started an ambitious program of education reforms. Successive education ministers have set out to modernise the education system through reforming the national curriculum and teaching and assessment approaches, to produce citizens with strong foundational skills, open minds, and inclusive values.Australia is a long-term supporter of the Indonesian basic education sector, with continuous investments supporting education quality improvements for the past two decades, including through the INOVASI program (Phase 1 2016-2020; Phase 2 2020-2023) that focused on supporting acquisition of literacy and numeracy foundational skills in early grades classrooms; exploring local problems and solutions; and generating evidence to inform government policy development and practices.This third phase of INOVASI (2024-2027) builds upon the existing program's approach and lessons learned and takes the focus on the development of foundational skills through to the end of the primary grades. Phase 3 will engage with priority issues of Australia's development policy: gender equality, effective inclusion of children with a disability, responses to the climate change challenge in education. It will focus on the challenge of policy implementation and the gaps that exist between national policies and practices at district and school levels, and use the well attested-success of INOVASI's local problem-based approach to continuously support policy development for effective fit between policy and implementation context.The Program is managed by Palladium on behalf of DFAT.**Primary Duties and Responsibilities**:**Purpose of the Position**:The Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL) Officer will contribute to the work of the Performance and Learning (PNL) team in supporting implementation of MERL activities and operation. INOVASI's MERL Strategy will describe (i) the program's approach to assessing and reporting progress towards and achievement of EOPOs and IOs, (ii) how evidence generated by the MERL system will be used in program decision making, adaptation, communications, and policy dialogue, (iii) the program's research agenda and how it will contribute to and support assessment of progress and achievement of IOs and EOPOs, and (iv) the resourcing and roles and responsibilities of the Performance and Learning (PNL) team. Implementation of the MERL Strategy will involve the Jakarta PNL team as well as MERL personnel in each provincial team.**Working with children**Is this position likely to come into contact with children? Yes No**Duties**:Under the direction of Monitoring and Learning Specialist, the MERL Officer will:Support the PNL team in any monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning activities as required by the Monitoring and Learning Specialist or the MERL Lead. Examples of the tasks are extracting key points from Program Database Management System (PDMS), entering PNL data to PDMS and uploading relevant PNL documents in Share-point, providing data on budget-related items, be a PIC for small activity outlined in PAC (or other types of format), participating in implementing MERL activities (such as collect data), and preparing presentation materials, briefs and memos on key programmatic issues. In performing these roles the MERL Officer will work across and collaborate with national and subnational teams, with particular attention to GEDSI priorities.- Management of PDMS. The roles involve:- Referring to MERL Strategy, support the Monitoring and Learning Specialist, in collaboration with the future PDMS consultant, in improving the existing PDMS platform. The adjustment aims to transform the current features into an informative and a more-user friendly platform for more practical and easier use and better visualisation, including in adopting useful and relevant information technology to advance its performance (AI, Power-BI, or others). The web-based platform should be efficient and effective in capturing and documenting monitoring data such as activities and output, on one hand, and on the other hand, in supporting analysis (quantitative and qualitative data) in generating findings on outcomes (IOs and EoPOs) and how INOVASI contributes. The platform also must function well for storing document (
