Conservation Data Advisor NGO Job Nature Conservancy

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What We Can Achieve Together:

The Conservation Impact System Team (IST) in the Chief Conservation Office plays a critical role in supporting global conservation implementation. The IST supports conservation teams, leaders, and executives to generate and use evidence in adaptive management and reporting so that TNC can achieve its goals for biodiversity, climate, and people. The IST is comprised of the Conservation Data Team (CDT) and Conservation Strategy Team (CST) that partner closely to provide support. The CDT is responsible for conservation data capacity building, data quality, science & systems, and organizational reporting, including reporting and recommendations to executives and the global board. This position focuses on enabling regional teams to consistently generate, trust, and use high‑quality data and evidence through strong MEL systems, standards, and practices. The role works as a close partner with regional MEL leads to align CDT support with regional MEL priorities, processes, and ways of working.

Essential Functions:

The Africa Regional Advisor will help the CDT provide more direct and integrated support for conservation data that meets the demand of conservation teams and leaders within TNC’s Africa Region to generate and use evidence to improve the quality of their decisions and their impact.

The Africa Regional Advisor will cultivate an understanding of what drives customer satisfaction (customer = TNC conservation teams and leaders) in the Africa region and contribute to effective delivery of CDT support. The lead will serve as a cross-cultural/organizational broker and learning advocate, ensuring that the products and practices developed in the Africa region or in other regions of TNC are shared and co-evolve, resulting in a conservation data toolkit that is common to TNC and contextually relevant.

The Africa Conservation Data Advisor position will build and maintain strong, trusting relationships with key leadership and experts in the Africa Region, including monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) regional team and specialists, scientists, and portfolio managers. They will collaborate with MEL staff in Africa to ensure CDT’s support is aligned with their vision for conservation science data, MEL and reporting to support evidence for adaptive management in Africa Portfolio. The Africa Conservation Data Advisor will work with regional MEL leaders and partners to align science data support with priority needs to improve MEL data quality and adaptive management practices. The position collaborates closely with Africa MEL lead, CDT colleagues, and the CST Africa regional counterpart to ensure aligned support across MEL and strategy processes. This position will help deliver CDT offerings and provide technical and data science support. This role uses a learn-by-doing approach to the development, implementation, and iteration of CDT offerings to quickly learn and adjust.

This is a 2-year termed position.

The Conservation Data Advisor – Africa must reside and have work authorization in one of the TNC Africa program locations (Kenya, Tanzania, or Zambia).

We’re Looking for You:

• Provide targeted guidance and support focused on the generation and use of evidence in adaptive management, aligned with regional needs.
• Provide direct support to teams, grounded in agile, data science, and implementation science principles and values.
• Ensure support provided to teams is regionally and culturally appropriate, using a collaborative approach to design offerings and engaging local contractors as needed.
• Ensure conservation data science support provided to teams is aligned with and supportive of the regional portfolio management and reporting processes.
• Support teams to use evidence syntheses and close key science evidence gaps identified through their adaptive management processes and to ensure confidence in their reported outcomes.
• Support other members of the regional team to use conservation data tools as they support other high priority teams and programs.
• Build enabling conditions for the generation and use of evidence in adaptive management and prioritization in the Africa Region.
• Build trusting relationships with key TNC leadership in the Africa Region.
• In collaboration with MEL Regional team and MEL Specialists, build the enabling conditions for use of robust evidence in adaptive management.
• In close collaboration with Africa MEL staff, enhance data analytics processes to convert quality assured and evidence-based data into useful reporting and learning products (such as impact briefs, analytical summaries, and data reports) to inform program, portfolio, and leadership decisions.
• Collaborate with staff in CDT to ensure the region’s conservation data meets data quality & reporting standards and support regional leadership to drive accountability to these standards.
• Work with Africa Regional Conservation / Strategies leadership to identify top priority teams needing conservation data and learning support, and focus support on them.
• Collaborate with Africa Regional Conservation / Strategies leadership to support the use of conservation data in prioritization and strategic decision-making to advance impact in the region, including partnering to develop dashboards that support portfolio management and specific leadership decisions.
• Collaborate with other Africa Regional leadership team members to help influence and advance specific enabling conditions in the region for improving data quality and its use in adaptive management and prioritization, including further integration of conservation and financial data and planning.

​​​​​​​Grow CDT’s impact

• Measure / monitor value provided by CDT support in the region.
• Identify opportunities to scale up support models to meet the needs of the region and expand CDT’s impact, working in partnership with other regional CDT leads.
• Provide feedback to