Regional Researcher- Monitoring Evaluation and

India, the incumbent will work under the guidance of senior researchers at the International Water Management Institute, other CGIAR Centers and national, regional and global partners engaged on the Asia Mega Deltas Initiative.

**Background to the Asia Mega Deltas Initiative**

Home to 177 million people, the densely populated Asian Mega Deltas are biodiverse, fertile, and productive food baskets dominated by rice, fisheries and aquaculture that also support millions beyond the deltas. Asian Mega Deltas are the world´s most important rice-growing areas. As national governments in the AMD regions increasingly rely on the deltas to achieve national development goals for food security, nutrition and poverty alleviation, Delta food systems are fast reaching a significant tipping point aggravated by inappropriate development pathways. The Asian Mega Deltas are also most likely to experience climate risks and impacts, including more frequent and more intense floods, salinization, water shortages, and climate extremes that will slow down economic growth. This can erode national food security and trigger new poverty traps in these emerging climate hotspots.

One CGIAR’s **Securing the Food Systems of the Asian Mega-Deltas for Climate and Livelihood Resilience (AMD)** Initiative aims to support governments, NGOs, private sector and local communities in the Mekong, Ganges and Ayeyarwady deltas to transition to more diverse, resilient, and inclusive food systems. At its core, we recognize that Deltas are strongly interconnected systems, and AMD sees transdisciplinary approaches as key to the design of transformative food systems solutions. Our aim is to work collaboratively with strategic public, private and other stakeholders to co-design and implement actionable pathways out of poverty for millions in the five countries of focus - Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and India.

Research, implementation, and investments under the AMD are grouped into five Work Packages (WPs). The initiative: takes a systemic approach to support accelerated adaptation locally (WP1), to ensure that deltaic food systems can sustain and enhance nutrition security equitably (WP2), explores the potential for financially viable and sustainable investments strategies (WP3), emphasizes the need for sustainable, inclusive governance of natural resources on which diverse food system depend (WP4). WP5 provides regional foresight to advise of longer-term threats and opportunities.

**Purpose of the position**:
The incumbent will provide technical and management leadership of all MEL activities and outputs in the AMD initiative. This will include supporting AMD leads to use MEL for adaptive management of AMD activities by preparing and writing progress reports and converting MEL information into communication products. S/He will coordinate with all AMD country stakeholders, CG staff, and researchers to collect and incorporate MEL information.

The AMD initiative is structured along five WPs - maintaining synergies between the WPs will be critical if, and cross-cutting issues of social inclusion and equity are key to transforming food system diversification, productivity, and resilience. some key elements of this position will include:

- Leading the co-development of a MEL framework for AMD with WP leads, other AMD scientists and partners, that cater to both the specific needs of each WP as well as the importance of building synergies across WPs;
- Tracking the co-design, implementation and impacts of policies, technologies and other interventions to support more diverse, resilient, and inclusive food systems in the face of rapid climatic and other change;
- Evaluating socially differentiated outcomes of changes in deltaic agroecosystems and food production practices in response to multiple drivers, paying attention to food consumption patterns and behaviours and their impact on poverty, nutrition, gender and social inclusion and local food systems economies;
- Ensuring operationalization of the MEL framework provides ongoing learning that can inform adaptive planning in response to changes to external contexts or to improve AMD activities;
- Ensuring the MEL framework can provide evidence with respect to attribution linking AMD strategies and activities to outcomes and impacts, and
- Supporting AMD contribute lessons to its country, regional and global audiences around transdisciplinary approaches for promoting more diverse, resilient, and inclusive delta food systems.

**General Duties and Responsibilities**:
Provide technical and management leadership of all MEL in the AMD initiative.
- Design, implement, and oversee the MEL system for the AMD initiative and ensure MEL framework is Gender Equal and Socially Inclusive (GESI).
- Ensure complementarity of MEL framework with AMD theory of change, and project results framework and the institutional Results-Based Management (RBM) systems, and CGIAR MEL tools and methods.
- Organize internal t