Job Opportunity for Research Officer at Evidence Action in Delhi

Position Overview

Job Title: Research Officer

Employment Status: Regular Full Time

Position Location: New Delhi

Grade: 4

Number of positions: One

About Evidence Action

Evidence Action aims to be a world leader in scaling evidence-based and cost-effective programs to reduce the burden of poverty for hundreds of millions of people in the poorest places. Last year Deworm the World reached 280 million people with deworming medications, partnering with governments to launch, scale, and sustain mass school-based deworming programs, including in India. Meanwhile, Dispensers for Safe Water provided 4M people across rural Africa with clean water, saving thousands of young lives. The approach relies on an innovative and human-centric design to deliver clean water at the source. These serve as just two examples of the work Evidence Action is undertaking.

In addition to running these scaled programs, Evidence Action leverages its unique Accelerator to develop the next generation of programs. These programs are rigorously tested to ensure exceptional scale, cost-effectiveness, and clear evidence of impact. In 2019 we launched an ambitious new strategy, intending to double our impact over the next five years, with much of that impact coming from new programs identified and scaled through the Accelerator.

Evidence Action has a presence across 7 countries, with major offices in Nairobi, Kenya; Delhi, India; and Washington, D.C. Evidence Action’s programs have been recognized by GiveWell, the Skoll Foundation, the Life You Can Save, Giving What We Can, and covered in the Economist, NPR, and the New York Times.

In India, Evidence Action’s technical partner EAII Advisors provides technical assistance to select state government’s ministries of health, education, and women and child development to implement the school and Anganwadi based National Deworming Day program and Iron and Folic Acid (IFA) supplementation program to improve children’s health, education, and long-term development. In the long term EAII Advisors aims to expand to provide technical support to more state governments and on other public health & nutrition issues too.

The India program invites applications for the position of Research Officer at the MLE unit to be based at the Delhi office. The Monitoring Learning and Evaluation (MLE) Unit is a cross cutting unit which leads and provides technical support to the programme units in developing and implementing monitoring and evaluation activities across the program.

About The Position

The Research Officer is a member of Evidence Action’s Monitoring, Learning and Evaluation India team supporting a range of organizational learning and development efforts, including advancing the organization’s own research, monitoring, learning and evaluation work to inform program strategy. This position reports to Research Manager and will support in conducting high-quality epidemiological prevalence surveys, designing of new areas of research, developing concept notes, developing protocols and training manuals, planning, implementation and management of data collection, including epidemiological data, higher level of analytics, document and developing interpretation in an easy manner to strengthen the program. The position will also support other need-based activities under the M&E functions and will be based at the Delhi office.

Responsibilities:

• With guidance, design and implement MLE strategies catering to organization priorities. These include strategies for data capture, return, entry, cleaning, analysis, storage, and other related activities.
• Participate actively in efforts and initiatives to ideate, develop and implement new research/ operation research activities.
• Lead and support the MLE team in ethical approval processes for various surveys.
• Support in design research protocols, survey instruments and techniques and its administration, monitoring and quality control.
• Review of scientific papers and prepare a database of research and evidence around deworming and other relevant issues for sharing with stakeholders.
• Design and develop operational research /research activities including designing research protocols, survey instruments, training, monitoring and quality control related to the deworming and other related areas.
• Will participate, input and consolidate inputs on various research and evaluation designs, tools and other MLE activities.
• Stay current on technical knowledge, including WHO and national guidelines for helminth control and latest research and publications, and share latest developments with others team/s.
• Support in writing publications, reports, articles and other research material and ensure research is published in peer reviewed journals.
• Support in disseminating findings and recommendations to the intended audiences in user-friendly methods.
• Support in monitoring and ensure the quality of the data collection and data management during the implementation phase of Research, Epidemiological prevalence surveys and ensure quality in the analysis and report writing phase.
• Support in developing and managing partnerships, developing contracts and agreements for conducting research and prevalence survey activities.
• Coordinate with states and partners for appropriate planning and implementation of Prevalence surveys, evaluation tools and plans as recommended.
• Perform any other related tasks as required.
• Willing to travel at least 30% of the time as assigned.

Disclaimer: The duties and responsibilities described are not a comprehensive list and that additional tasks may be assigned to the employee from time to time.

Essential Qualifications, Experience, and Competencies

• Advanced degree in statistics/biostatistics/public health/demography/population studies, economics or related field of data science with background in public health or related field.
• 3-5 years of work experience related to designing, implementation of Research, M&E components of national level public health programs.
• Experience of handling large scale datasets and work experience in reputed academic or research/survey organizations is preferred.
• Strong analytical skills with command and experience of working with quantitative software like Stata or SPSS is essential. Excellent interpersonal skills, sound judgment, communication skills, training experience, ability to identify and resolve policy and operational constraints.
• Excellent written and verbal communication and presentation skills in Hindi and English.
• Willingness to travel as and when required, and often on short notice.

Desirables

• Knowledge and experience of using qualitative software like N-Vivo or Atlas-ti is desirable.
• Proven data management with quantitative and qualitative analysis skills.
• Prior experience in managing data collection, preferably for a field experiment.
• Strong organizational skills with ability to work in teams, result oriented and culturally diverse environment.
• Self-motivated, strong initiative. Experience and ability working with senior government officials at state and district level.

Benefits

Compensation: Competitive and commensurate with the individual’s credentials, experience, and previous pay scale.