Research and Advocacy Officer

Duties and Responsibilities

Position Summary:
-Design and implement research projects to gather data relevant to the hub's goals.
-Analyse qualitative and quantitative data to draw insights and inform advocacy strategies.
-Prepare comprehensive reports, policy briefs, and presentations to communicate findings to internal and external stakeholders.
-Develop advocacy strategies based on research findings to influence policy and decision-making.
-Collaborate with other organisations, government agencies, and stakeholders to promote advocacy efforts.
-Support training and capacity-building initiatives for young people, staff and partners on research methods and advocacy techniques.
-Collaborating with the Communications team, prepare communication materials, including social media content, to share research findings and raise awareness about advocacy issues.
-Establish relationships with key stakeholders, including policymakers, researchers, and community leaders.

Key Responsibilities:
Coordinate the development and delivering of quality youth-led research and advocacy programmes (50%).
-Engage relevant stakeholders in research design, implementation and review.
-Ensure that research and youth-led advocacy programmes are implemented in line with the Power Shifting Checklist and the Results Framework, ensuring quality review of the work plan, resources and implementation schedule.
-Design and deliver relevant training to young people to support them in conducting research and developing and implementing advocacy initiatives.
-Support the young leaders in coordinating, planning, and implementing research activities.

Consolidate the hub’s annual research priorities (10%)
-Identify and implement the hub’s research goals and priorities for the upcoming year through a consultative process.
-Ensure alignment of research priorities with organisational goals, available resources, and anticipated impacts.
-Define measurable success metrics and performance indicators for each prioritised research area.
-Adjust the priorities based on changing circumstances, new insights, or feedback from the year.

Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (10%).
-Ensure that research projects have systems and processes to enable evidence generation and encourage feedback loops, sharing, and learning across units.
-Coordinate the development of the projects’ monthly and quarterly narrative reports with inputs from the young leaders and MERL team.
-Document best practices and lessons learned from the projects.

Human resource management (10%)
-Lead Young Leaders and Youth Researchers, ensuring their safety and security.
-Ensure that human resource policies are adhered to.
-Lead training and other capacity-building initiatives for staff, interns and partners on research and youth-led advocacy.

Finance Management (10%)
-Lead programme budget management and control.
-Uphold all financial policies and procedures in all expenditures.
-Prepare monthly budgets and requisitions with an understanding of the current budget position.
-Prepare monthly expenditure reports against approved budgets, providing detailed variance analysis.

Partnership development and management (10%)
-Develop partnerships with all key stakeholders in the communities in which we operate.
-Identify and pursue opportunities to raise Restless Development Zimbabwe’s profile, particularly in research and advocacy.
-Contribute to grant proposal writing, donor harvesting and partner meetings.

Other duties as assigned by the line manager. You may occasionally be required to work on weekends and/or public holidays, for which time off in lieu will be granted.