MEL & Research Manager

Role Overview

Based in Nairobi, this position owns the measurement and learning agenda behind Digital Green's work in Kenya and Nigeria, with a particular emphasis on FarmerChat, the organisation's AI-powered agricultural advisory platform. Day to day, the role turns open questions from program, product and donor teams into research designs, instruments and analyses that reveal who is actually using FarmerChat, how farmers engage with it, whether the advice is trusted and acted on, and whether that translates into changes in practice, productivity, income, agency and resilience. It is a hands-on position that blends conventional monitoring, evaluation and research craft with the analysis of digital product data and deliberate experimentation with new ways of measuring and learning.

Key Responsibilities

• Shape research and measurement designs: convert program and product priorities into clear research questions, hypotheses, indicators and measurement plans, and make defensible calls on sampling approaches, sample-size and power calculations, comparison groups, and when to measure.
• Build the instruments: develop quantitative farmer survey tools covering agricultural practice, the relevance and trustworthiness of advisory, uptake of recommendations, productivity, costs, income, agency, resilience and related outcomes, alongside interview and focus group guides that explore how and why farmers use FarmerChat, what they value, and what gets in the way.
• Run field research across two countries: coordinate data collection with farmers in Kenya and Nigeria, prepare sampling and recruitment plans, train enumerators and external research partners on protocols, and monitor incoming data with systematic quality checks from launch to close.
• Analyse data rigorously: clean, manage and analyse quantitative datasets using Excel together with Stata and/or R, applying descriptive and inferential techniques such as significance testing, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and subgroup comparisons, including gender-based analysis.
• Connect product data to farmer outcomes: work with FarmerChat backend and usage records alongside survey and qualitative evidence to examine frequency and intensity of use, the kinds of questions farmers ask, value chains of interest, retention and drop-off, and variation across farmer segments, linking reported outcomes to digital engagement where the data allow.
• Test alternative measurement methods: pilot voice-based data collection, AI-enabled or agentic MEL tools, shorter or adaptive survey formats, and different incentive designs, then assess the trade-offs against established approaches in terms of validity, representativeness, bias, cost, response rates, data quality and the experience of participating farmers.
• Support experimental work: contribute to randomised evaluations, A/B tests and quasi-experimental studies where appropriate, and partner with product and data colleagues to define metrics that make platform-generated data useful for evaluation and research.
• Turn evidence into decisions and documentation: produce research briefs, reports and presentations for internal teams, partners and donors; translate findings into practical recommendations for product development and program delivery; and maintain reproducible workflows with well-documented codebooks, analysis files, statistical code, assumptions and methodological choices — including honest accounts of pilots and experiments that did not succeed.

Requirements & Qualifications

• A bachelor's degree in economics, statistics, public policy, development studies, project management, agricultural economics, social sciences or another quantitative or research-oriented discipline, paired with roughly 3–5 years of relevant MEL, applied research or evaluation experience; or a relevant master's degree with roughly 1–3 years of such experience.
• Demonstrated experience designing quantitative surveys and other research instruments from scratch.
• Strong analytical capability, including proficiency in Excel and working proficiency in Stata and/or R or comparable software.
• A solid grounding in applied statistics: descriptive statistics, confidence intervals, statistical significance and hypothesis testing.
• Familiarity with sampling methods and sample-size calculations, including statistical power considerations.
• Hands-on experience cleaning, managing and analysing survey or program datasets.
• Experience conducting or supporting qualitative research through interviews and/or focus groups.
• A strong orientation to data quality, with experience creating or running data-quality checks.
• Excellent documentation habits — the ability to record research methods, instruments, datasets, analytical decisions and findings clearly enough for others to follow and build on.
• The ability to explain data and findings in plain terms to colleagues who are not researchers.
• Comfort working across functions, especially with program, product and data or technology teams.
• Strong written and spoken English plus a local language.
• Genuine curiosity and the willingness to teach yourself new tools, analytical techniques and research methods.
• Willingness and ability to travel for field-based work.

Experience that would strengthen a candidacy

• Work in agriculture or with smallholder farmers in Kenya or elsewhere in East Africa.
• MEL or research experience for digital products, digital advisory services, AI-enabled tools or other technology-for-development programs.
• Analysis of product or administrative data alongside traditional survey data.
• Experience linking survey responses to digital usage or transactional datasets.
• Familiarity with SurveyCTO, KoboToolbox, ODK or similar digital data-collection platforms.
• Exposure to randomised evaluations, A/B testing, quasi-experimental methods or impact evaluation.
• Experience with voice-based research, conversational surveys, AI-enabled research tools or other emerging data-collection approaches.
• Testing participant incentives or other ways of improving participation and response rates.
• Managing external research firms, enumerators or field research teams.
• Knowledge of Kenya's agricultural sector and smallholder farming context.

Why Join

This is a role for a researcher who has built a strong foundation in MEL or applied research and now wants to deepen both technical and leadership skills. You will report to the Director of MEL and work closely with Digital Green's Kenya program, product, user insights and technology teams, as well as external research and implementation partners. As the work progresses, you will take on increasing ownership of research and evaluation and help shape Digital Green's wider evidence agenda for FarmerChat — an opportunity to work at the intersection of agriculture, digital technology and AI, and to experiment with new measurement approaches that could change how the sector learns.