Reporting / Supervisor : Associate Director MEL
Location : Colombia
Contract : Full-time employee
Starting Date : November 2025
Travel : 25/40%
About Acceso:
Acceso (www.acceso.org) is a social enterprise that is revolutionizing food systems in Latin America and the Caribbean to put smallholder farmers first. Acceso’s mission is to create fundamental and lasting positive economic change in the lives of rural smallholder farming families. Our entrepreneurial model provides smallholder farmers with a sustainable way to participate in formalized markets, enabling them to work themselves out of poverty with dignity and to prosper. Acceso currently operates a portfolio of three social businesses in Colombia, Haiti and El Salvador and an agtech tool (Extensio) founded in Mexico. Across our agribusinesses, we have impacted nearly 35,000 smallholder farmers and farm workers, generating more than $80m in farmer income to date.
About this Role:
The Manager of Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL) will provide technical leadership, strategic insights and seamless execution to implement the processes for collecting and analyzing data across Acceso’s portfolio of programs for purposes of assessing and increasing program and organizational impact for smallholder farmers, food system workers, and rural communities. The Manager will work closely with Acceso’s Associate Director of MEL and Acceso’s leadership, program and field teams.
Sample Acceso programs:
• Agricultural programs for farmers (digital and in person technical assistance, inputs, credit, commercialization schemes)
• Market-linked reforestation
• Locally sourced feeding for vulnerable communities, e.g. schools and refugees
• Community Training Farms impacting women and youth
Key Responsibilities:
Management and Leadership
- Together with the Associate Director of MEL, create, grow and lead the MEL team within Acceso to create a culture of MEL and ensure the impact of the organization.
- Create and support a culture of quick feedback loops (rather than postprogram reports) using data to inform programmatic and commercial adjustments to maximize impact.
- Under the leadership of the Associate Director of MEL, train and supervise local staff on monitoring and evaluation procedures, data collection tools, and data management practices
Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning
- Together with the Associate Director of MEL, design, implement and oversee MEL processes, in coordination with local teams, to track, collect, visualize and analyze social impact data.
- Together with the Associate Director of MEL, monitor the implementation of Acceso’s Theory of Change, measure its reach and propose learnings and adjustments to the teams to ensure real deep impact of Acceso’s operations
- Undertake regular visits to the field to support implementation of MEL activities.
- Ensure data quality through data verification procedures and routine data quality audits.
Program impact and feedback
- Perform field work involving surveys, focus groups, user testing, and other methodologies to gauge program success
- Support the execution of specific program evaluations such as randomized control trials (RCTs), including logistical planning and execution, review of results, and other tasks as required
- Design and prepare dashboards and reports for internal and external review, including supporting the preparation of social impact reports for donors
New Program Development
- Contribute to program design, in coordination with central Acceso program and local teams
- Ensure that all learnings gathered from the organizational or programmatic MEL activities are being fed back into making Acceso and its programs stronger
Required Qualifications and Skills:
- Bachelor’s degree in economics, statistics, engineering, business administration or international development. Master’s degree is a plus.
- 5+ years of program and/or MEL experience; led program development or MEL processes.
- Experience leading MEL on large programs reporting directly to USAID, IDB or other multi-lateral or bi-lateral donors
- Proven ability to manage complex projects involving rural communities, NGOs, public sector and private sector actors
- Previous experience of working in Latin America preferred, in projects related to agriculture, sustainable fishing, livelihoods, agtech, and/or rural development
- Strong analytical skills, database management experience and proficient in Excel and other statistical software and tools such as Stata, R, Python, SPSS, or similar. Data analysis/visualization/reporting tools such as CommCare, Farmforce KoBoToolbox, SurveyCTO.
- Genuine interest in the use of data to drive impact, make decisions and improve rural livelihoods
- Entrepreneur-minded and creative (out-of-the-box thinker)
- Enthusiastic and optimistic individual, with the drive to change the world for the better
- Ambition to consolidate Acceso as a change agent to transform livelihoods in rural LAC
- Detail oriented and meticulously organized
- Results-oriented decision maker
- Ability to travel internationally
- Language skills: Working fluency in Spanish and English. French or Haitian Creole a plus.
