Monitoring and Evaluation Senior Specialist

POSITION INFORMATION

- VA No.: UNDP/LBN/VA26/151

- Position Title: Monitoring and Evaluation Senior Specialist

- Duty Station: Home based (online), with no field visits required

- Duration: 5 months (without exceeding 8 working days per month)

- Vacancy Date of Issue: 26 August 2026

- Vacancy Closure Date: 02 September 2026

- National or International consultancy: National consultancy

To review the full Terms of Reference (TOR), please follow link:

https: //drive.google.com/file/d/1A3RQK-myHFUJB2vfOXwoiSp4Le1JR1Jh/view

BACKGROUND

The Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) Through Advancing Women-Led Enterprises in Lebanon is a new project funded by the Government of Canada for a period of 3.5 years. The project aims to support gender-responsive job creation and help generate economic opportunities for women-led micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) across various productive sectors with high growth potential. Through this objective, the project will foster the economic security, stability, and prosperity of women entrepreneurs and women-led MSMEs in Lebanon. The project includes three main components:

Component 1: Ensuring that government institutions are more responsive to women’s needs through processes that are more conducive to doing business.

Component 2: Ensuring that women-led MSMEs have access to the financial resources required to grow and remain sustainable.

Component 3: Ensuring that women-led MSMEs receive the technical support needed to increase their access to local and international markets.

The project was developed in response to the multiple crises that have affected Lebanon, particularly the financial crisis, which has hindered the ability of MSMEs in general, and women-led MSMEs in particular, to access the financing needed for growth. With the collapse of the banking system and the resulting depletion of financing sources, access to finance is considered one of the greatest impediments preventing MSMEs, particularly women-led MSMEs, from developing and taking their businesses to the next level. This has compounded the barriers already faced by women entrepreneurs, including stringent collateral requirements, high interest rates, complex documentation processes, suboptimal financial literacy, and a lack of market information. Through the WEE project, UNDP Lebanon is implementing a comprehensive approach to foster women’s equal access to the resources, tools, and economic opportunities needed to conduct business more effectively. At the same time, the project seeks to ensure that public and private institutions are more responsive to women’s needs and can provide them with the necessary tools, systems, and opportunities to become the main drivers of their economic success and empowerment. The project is being implemented in partnership with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), which is responsible for implementing the third component related to market access. Since the project’s inception in 2024, UNDP has successfully implemented a range of activities and interventions across its three components. Implementation is guided by a comprehensive Project Monitoring Framework (PMF), structured around the project’s intended outcomes and outputs. As implementation has progressed and interventions have expanded across the different components and implementing partners, including UNDP and UNIDO, a need has emerged to further strengthen and harmonize the project’s monitoring and evaluation (M&E) approach. In particular, there is a need to enhance consistency between UNDP and UNIDO monitoring systems and tools and to conduct outcome-monitoring exercises that capture the direct results of key activities, including the disbursement of low-value grants and loans and the support provided through the National Trade Help Desks. These priorities, together with relevant recommendations from the project’s mid-term evaluation, provide the basis for engaging specialized M&E expertise to strengthen the project’s overall results measurement, learning, and reporting.

SCOPE OF WORK, RESPONSIBILITIES AND DESCRIPTION OF THE PROPOSED ANALYTICAL WORK

Based on the above, UNDP is seeking the services of an experienced Monitoring and Evaluation Senior Specialist to strengthen and operationalize the project’s monitoring, evaluation, and data management systems in line with the recommendations of the project’s mid-term evaluation, conducted in the first quarter of 2026. The appointed consultant will be responsible for conducting two outcome-monitoring tasks, which will serve as practical applications of the strengthened M&E system. Under the supervision of the Project Manager and in close coordination with the Gender Specialist, the M&E Senior Specialist will be responsible for the following: - Reviewing the monitoring and evaluation framework: Review the existing Project Monitoring Framework (PMF), including the current indicators, monitoring tools, data collection methodologies, and reporting mechanisms implemented by UNDP and UNIDO. Based on this review, determine the framework for the assignment and harmonize monitoring approaches between UNDP and UNIDO across the project components. The consultant will also assess the adequacy of the project indicators to ensure they are outcome-oriented, sex-disaggregated, and aligned with Leave No One Behind (LNOB) principles. - Developing a socioeconomic outcome-monitoring framework to capture the short-term changes resulting from low-value grants and loans disbursed to women-led enterprises and developing the related data collection tools: Develop and implement a comprehensive socioeconomic outcome-monitoring methodology to measure the contribution of the low-value grants, loans, and technical assistance provided by UNDP and UNIDO to women-owned and women-led MSMEs. The consultant will design comprehensive data collection tools or survey questionnaires and develop an analytical framework to assess the results of the grants in relatio