Evidence and Learning Manager

SRI Executive Search has been contracted by the Global Grids Catalyst (GGC) to assist with the search for an exceptional candidate to fill the position of Evidence and Learning Manager.

About Global Grids Catalyst (GGC)

Global Grids Catalyst (GGC) is a collaborative funder initiative hosted by the Pooled Fund on International Energy (PIE). GGC’s mission is to accelerate global investment in and modernisation of electricity grids by connecting funders, civil society, and technical experts. Funders participating in GGC accept a single reporting framework and undertake to minimise bespoke reporting requests, a commitment that makes this role viable. The Evidence and Learning Manager will play a central part in helping this small, distributed team learn from its grantmaking and adapt as it scales.

For more information, visit www.globalgridscatalyst.org.

About Pooled Fund on International Energy (PIE)

Pooled Fund on International Energy (PIE) is a collaborative initiative. PIE supports leading organisations to work with governments, businesses, and societies to overcome the barriers to clean energy and clean steel and to achieve our common goals of a safe climate, clean air and a just energy transition.

Role Purpose

The Evidence and Learning Manager leads GGC’s organisational learning and evidence function, helping the organisation make better strategic decisions about where and how to invest its resources. The role is responsible for stewarding and continuously evolving GGC’s MEL framework, cultivating a culture of curiosity and learning across the portfolio, synthesising evidence from diverse sources, demonstrating the value GGC itself adds to the grids field, and ensuring that insights translate into action. Success in this role is measured not by the metrics tracked, but by whether GGC develops a culture of evidence and learning and a set of practices that implement it.

This is a hands-on build role in a small, globally distributed team. The Evidence and Learning Manager will work closely with the Communications Manager, who will convene GGC’s partners and communicate GGC’s results and learning to external audiences (both positions will be hired in Q1 2027). It suits someone whose first instinct is to look for the evidence and ask what it should change. Judgement, facilitation, and the ability to move a decision matter more in this role than technical evaluation expertise.

Major Duties and Responsibilities

Strategic Learning and Decision Support

• Set GGC’s learning agenda from the decisions leadership needs to make. Agree each year with the Executive Director and Chief of Staff the questions the evidence should answer (are we funding the right interventions, where is our influence greatest, what should we scale, change, or stop), and organise evidence collection around them rather than around what is interesting or available.
• Feed evidence into strategic planning, portfolio design, and resource allocation, and give the Executive Director and Chief of Staff honest, timely reads on what the evidence supports and what it does not, including where it runs against a position GGC has already taken.
• Over time, help turn GGC’s approach into an evidence and learning framework that funders and grantees across the grids field can use.

Portfolio Synthesis and Sense-Making

• Synthesise learning across intervention levers, geographies, and grants, identifying where grants reinforce one another, where they duplicate, and where coverage of a lever or geography is thin.
• Synthesise external research and sector evidence to help GGC interpret portfolio results within broader developments in the power sector. Consult the evidence that already exists before commissioning new studies: the scarce capability GGC is buying is interpretation, not data collection.
• Turn synthesis into things people use: short insight notes for leadership, papers for the Administrative Committee and Grids Leadership Council that include an honest assessment of where the strategy is not working, and practical decision-support tools, including dashboards where useful.
• Document course corrections: what GGC changed, on what evidence, and what happened next. This record is the substantive output of the learning system, not a by-product of it.

Learning Practice with Partners and the Team

• Design and run GGC’s learning practice across its intervention levers, working with the Communications Manager to convene each community at the moment in the year when it has something real to discuss, rather than aggregating the portfolio into a single annual meeting.
• Create the conditions in which grantees and colleagues will say what is not working: make failure a legitimate agenda item, protect what is said, and bring in external facilitation where GGC’s position as funder makes candour unlikely.
• Build learning literacy across a small team in which no one else holds this expertise, so that colleagues interrogate evidence themselves rather than routing every question through this role.

The MEL Framework

• Own GGC’s MEL framework, being designed during 2026 with external support, and keep it current as GGC’s understanding and the external environment change. Hold to its core design principle: every indicator must inform a decision, and indicators that stop doing so are removed.
• Maintain three small sets of indicators: system-level indicators tied to GGC’s theory of change (measures such as grid expansion, transfer capacity, and reliability), sourced from existing public datasets where those are fit for purpose; partner-level indicators covering what grantees can plausibly influence; and measures of the value GGC itself adds.
• Build and own the evidence on GGC’s own value add, in grids and in what the team does day to day: aligning funders behind a shared grids strategy, technical input to grantees and decision-makers, convening, and field building.
• Keep GGC’s framework docked to PIE’s organisation-wide MEL framework through a limited number of indicators, without becoming subordinate to it, and maintain working relationships with the MEL teams at PIE and at GGC’s funders.
• Make GGC’s MEL work inside PIE’s systems. PIE sets up the platforms; this role checks that the set-up works for GGC, including grid-relevant indicator menus and drop-downs, reporting fields and schedules, and data that can be pulled for GGC’s own reporting, and owns fixing gaps with PIE’s systems and grants teams. Keep GGC’s data and configuration portable if hosting arrangements change.

Reporting and Evaluation

• Produce GGC’s single annual report to all funders, covering portfolio results and GGC’s own contribution, working with the Communications Manager on presentation, and use it for GGC’s own reflection: if preparing the annual report teaches GGC nothing, it has been built wrong.
• Hold the line on the single-framework commitment and keep grantee reporting proportionate. Build on the monitoring grantees already do, and where a funder requests bespoke data that adds grantee burden without informing a decision, say so and escalate rather than absorb it.
• Commission and manage external evaluations selectively where deeper evidence is needed, from terms of reference through to making sure findings are used rather than filed, and manage MEL consultants and learning partners.
• Plan and budget the learning workplan annually, including convenings, facilitation, and the travel required for partners to participate.

Profile

Required Qualification

• A track record of using evidence to change what an organisation did, not simply what it reported, and of asking what is surprising in a body of evidence rather than confirming what was already expected.
• Strong judgement and facilitation skills, including designing and running sessions with external partners where participants discuss what is not working.
• At least six years in learning, evaluation, research, or strategy roles, including direct ownership of a learning or evidence function.
• Experience operating and improving a MEL or learning framework anchored in a theory of change at portfolio or programme level, including deciding what not to measure and declining requests for measurement that serves no decision, and evidencing the contribution of an intermediary, funder or network, not only of its grantees.
• Ability to synthesise existing evidence from mixed sources into a short, usable read for senior decision-makers, with practical command of both quantitative and qualitative methods.
• Excellent written English, with the ability to produce a funder report a board will read, an insight note leadership will act on, and a learning note a grantee will recognise as fair.
• Demonstrated effectiveness working remotely across multiple time zones in a small team without established process.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in philanthropy or re-granting, particularly a collaborative fund operating a single reporting framework across multiple funders.
• Background in the power sector, energy transition, or infrastructure policy, or clear evidence of picking up technical vocabulary quickly.
• Experience in one or more of GGC’s priority geographies, particularly in Asia.
• Additional language skills relevant to GGC’s work across Asia, Europe, and emerging markets are highly desirable.
• Experience commissioning and managing external evaluators.
• Comfort working with public datasets and a visualisation tool (Looker Studio, Power BI, Tableau, or equivalent), and with grants and project management platforms such as Monday.com.

Terms of Appointment

Reports to: Chief of Staff, with a dotted line to the Director of Operations (data, systems, and reporting infrastructure)

Level: L4 (manager level)

Compensation and Benefits

• Annual salary: EUR 58,000–95,700, depending on location (final figure set against the L4 salary band for the hire’s country of residence).
• Benefits package based on hosting arrangements and location.

Working Conditions

• Fully remote, with collaboration across multiple time zones and flexible scheduling.
• Regular travel for lever-community convenings, team meetings, and sector events. This role travels more than most GGC roles because the learning practice depends on people being in a room together.

Role Location

Remote (region open, preference for time-zone overlap with Europe and Asia; presence in or near a GGC priority geography is an advantage)

How to Apply

To apply for this position, please ensure you click Apply and complete the Application Form by 25 November 2026 (23:59 hrs, GMT +1). It is essential that you submit your CV in English, specifically in Microsoft Word format (.doc/.docx), not exceeding 10MB.

Applications in other languages or formats will not be considered.

Rest assured, all information will be handled with the utmost confidentiality.