MEL, Knowledge Management and Communications Coordinator

Background

The Forest Governance Markets and Climate programme (FGMC) is FCDO’s flagship forest programme aiming to strengthen forest stewardship in developing countries so that their forests deliver economic, environmental and social benefits equitably, including revenues, community livelihoods, sustainable commodity trade and environmental services. In managing FGMC, FCDO is assisted by an outsourced Programme Management & Strategy Support Team (PMSST). The PMSST is an independent, stand-alone team, hosted by NIRAS, and works directly with FCDO to manage the FGMC2 programme. This programme management includes cross-cutting communications, monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL), and knowledge management functions that strengthen accountability, learning, collaboration, and decision-making. The position of the MEL, Knowledge Management and Communications Coordinator will cover the following three cross-cutting functions:

• MEL supports accountability, adaptive management, and learning across the programme. It provides a structured approach to assessing progress, generating and synthesising evidence, testing assumptions within the programme's Theory of Change, and identifying lessons to inform decision-making and programme improvement. The MEL system brings together evidence from across countries, themes, and delivery partners to support reporting, learning, and strategic oversight.
• Knowledge management aims to ensure programme knowledge, evidence, and learning are organised, accessible, and usable throughout the life of the programme. This role supports the translation of MEL evidence and learning into usable information to inform adaptive planning and management in the programme.
• Communications support influencing, learning and accountability across the programme. PMSST’s role is to: strengthen partners’ ability to influence policy and market decisions by synthesising and sharing FGMC-supported evidence, and by facilitating strategic media engagement to extend reach and reinforce credibility; foster continuous and inclusive learning across FGMC, ensuring insights, including on effective communication practices, are accessible, contextualised and applied, by facilitating exchanges, peer learning and targeted dissemination within and beyond the Community of Practice, and; demonstrate accountability and value by evidencing and amplifying FGMC’s results and lessons, fostering sustained recognition and support for the programme and the UK’s leadership on forest governance.

Purpose

The MEL, Knowledge Management and Communications Coordinator supports the integration of MEL evidence and learning inform communications, decision-making, and adaptive management. The salary range for this role sits between £27-£32K. The role will:

• Coordinate evidence gathering, analysis, synthesis, scoring, and annual progress assessments across the FGMC MEL system, working with country leads and technical experts to validate evidence and continuously improve the methodologies and tools used to generate robust evidence for programme learning, communications, and decision-making.
• Manage day-to-day delivery of the PMSST communications function, overseeing implementation of the Communications Work Plan, ensuring communications priorities agreed with the Strategic Communications Lead are delivered effectively.
• Coordinate the day-to-day operation and ongoing development of the FGMC Knowledge Management System (KMS), with a focus on ensuring programme knowledge is curated, governed, and used effectively to support MEL, communications, learning, and decision-making.

Key Accountabilities

Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (50%)

• Coordinate the gathering, review, analysis, and synthesis of evidence for country and thematic annual progress assessments, producing evidence summaries, quality assessments, and scoring outputs against FGMC2 logframe indices and criteria.
• Coordinate validation with PMSST, FCDO, and country or thematic specialists, incorporating agreed changes and translating findings and scores into clear narratives for programme learning, communications, and decision-making.
• Maintain annual progress assessment and MEL documentation, helping to record methodological changes, lessons, and implications for programme management and reporting.
• Coordinate the development, testing, implementation, and continuous improvement of AI-enabled annual progress assessment tools, working with colleagues and technical experts to develop and refine custom tools, prompts, AI instructions, evidence-synthesis processes, and document-processing workflows.
• Coordinate and update MEL assessment tags within the KMS, enabling country and thematic leads to identify and organise evidence throughout the year, improving evidence retrieval and reducing reporting bottlenecks.
• Support the MEL Results Lead and PMSST with the continuous improvement of FGMC2 MEL processes through participation in programme-wide discussions, workshops, and learning activities, helping align annual progress assessments, theories of change, quarterly programme and ICF KPI reporting, and wider FCDO results requirements

Knowledge Management and Use (20%)

• Ensure that the organisation and functionality of the KMS support effective evidence retrieval and use, translating programme and user needs into clear requirements for the KMS Administrator, technical colleagues and suppliers.
• Promote consistent knowledge-sharing practices across the programme, supporting colleagues and partners to contribute, find, interpret and use relevant evidence and learning.
• Monitor how programme knowledge is accessed and used, gathering feedback and identifying improvements to knowledge-management processes, products and dissemination approaches.
• Provide input into future KMS development from a knowledge-use perspective, including requirements gathering, user consultation and testing, while working with the KMS Administrator and technical colleagues responsible for routine system administration and implementation.

Communications (20%)

• Act as the primary bridge between MEL, knowledge management, and communications, ensuring programme evidence and learning inform communications activities.
• Identify lessons, success stories, and knowledge products with communications potential, supporting the relevant PMSST Lead, communications team and delivery partner(s) to translate these into appropriate communications and learning outputs.
• Oversee communications monitoring, working with the communications team to track the performance, reach, and impact of communications activities, and using insights to inform planning, messaging, and future communications priorities.

Cross-cutting Integration and Programme Support (10%)

• Support coordination and information-sharing across MEL, communications, knowledge management, and AI workstreams, helping identify interdependencies, bottlenecks, and opportunities to improve efficiency and collaboration.
• Ensure that MEL evidence needs inform KMS design, metadata, search, access, and AI functionality, and that relevant KMS content can be translated into reporting, learning, and communications outputs.
• Support the development of AI-enabled tools across workstreams, working closely with the NIRAS AI Lead and relevant stakeholders to identify opportunities to improve efficiency, evidence use and knowledge management.
• Support the establishment of trackers, agendas and meeting summaries as needed, facilitating cross-coordination.
• Prepare updates and present progress on MEL and KMS activities through weekly, monthly, and quarterly reporting processes, as well as in team, client, and partner meetings.

Person Specification

Qualifications and Experience

Essential

• A relevant degree or equivalent professional experience in environmental governance, political science, forestry, natural-resource governance, sustainable trade or environmental development, or a related field.
• Experience supporting or coordinating MEL work, alongside communications or programme learning within an international development, environmental, or donor-funded programme.
• Experience reviewing and synthesising qualitative evidence from multiple sources.
• Experience developing or maintaining structured workplans, trackers, evidence tools, information-management processes, or digital systems.
• Experience coordinating workstreams involving multiple internal and external stakeholders, competing priorities, and interdependent deadlines.
• Experience working with Microsoft 365, particularly Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, SharePoint, and CoPilot.

Desirable

• Experience working with FCDO or another bilateral or multilateral donor.
• Experience applying theories of change, logframes, qualitative scoring frameworks, rubrics, indices, baselines, or quality-of-evidence approaches.
• Experience testing or governing generative AI or AI-supported knowledge tools such as CoPilot or Claude.
• Experience designing or delivering workshops, webinars, onboarding, or Communities of Practice activities.

Knowledge and Skills

• Excellent planning, organisation and prioritisation, with the ability to manage several workstreams with limited supervision.
• Strong facilitation, stakeholder-management, and constructive follow-up skills.
• Flexible and collaborative approach, with the ability to work across disciplines, organisations, and cultures.
• Strong qualitative research, evidence-review, synthesis, and analytical writing skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English, with strong editing, proofreading, and plain-language writing skills.
• Ability to adapt information, tone, and format for technical, policy, client, partner, and public audiences.
• Sound judgement when handling politically sensitive, reputationally sensitive, or restricted information.
• Ability to translate programme needs into clear digital-system requirements, test functionality methodically and communicate technical issues in accessible language.

Please note that this is a fixed-term position ending in March 2029, with the possibility of an extension.