Associate, Global Research and Evaluation (“RE”) at The Pharo Foundation

Opportunity

• As the Foundation expands its work across Africa, there is an exciting, growing opportunity to employ the latest research and evaluation tools to design programs, measure impact and guide future strategies. Working alongside the Foundation’s Chief Research and Evaluation Officer (CREO), the Associate RE will play a critical role in building and operating an efficient, rigorous, and impactful RE department that will influence the selection and design of development programs in multiple countries.

Key relationships

• Reporting to: Chief Research and Evaluation Officer
• Functional relationships: Mission Directors
• Country Program Officers
• Research and Evaluation team members

Duties and Responsibilities:

Research and Evaluation

• Contributing to the design of new Foundation programs in education, water, and productivity.
• Identifying the best econometric approaches to measuring the causal impact of the Foundation’s programs, considering local constraints.
• Designing creative evaluation, monitoring, and data products to shed light on program access, implementation, and usage, as well as shape the narrative on the problems we are aiming to solve.
• Managing day-to-day research, monitoring, and evaluation activities across the Foundation portfolio: Supervising, training, and collaborating with country staff.
• Regularly assessing progress in the field.
• Ensuring that basic quality standards are met.
• Cleaning and analysing data.
• Contributing to the production of research reports.
• Regularly traveling to project locations in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Somaliland, as needed.

Institutional / Administrative

• Assisting the Chief Research and Evaluation Officer (CREO) in building an integrated, highly functioning research, monitoring, and evaluation operation across the Foundation, including: Creating/updating institutional documents laying out our approach to research, monitoring, and evaluation, including guidelines for the new program proposals, field data collection activities, cleaning and documentation standards, pre-analysis plans, and end-products.
• Establishing a library of STATA and/or R codes for use across the organisation.
• Supporting the CREO in all other critical RE tasks and projects, including developing and engaging with a network of international development researchers and practitioners across the continent.

Technical Competencies

• Creative and entrepreneurial self-starter, with a focus on execution and results.
• Superior attention to detail.
• Ability to articulate complex ideas, summarize problems, and identify key lessons, clearly and effectively.
• Ability to multitask and balance multiple work assignments.
• Highly proficient in STATA and R, with experience in writing statistical code for data management, cleaning, and analysis.
• Highly proficient with survey platforms, like KoboCollect or SurveyCTO.
• Basic understanding of economics, econometrics, and statistics.
• Excellent writing and presentation (e.g., PowerPoint) skills.
• Ability to manage field surveys, focus groups, and randomized evaluations.
• Most importantly, excellent interpersonal and collaborative team-building skills.

Required Qualifications and Experiences

• Bachelor or Master's degree in Economics, International Development, Political Science, Statistics, Public Policy or a related field.
• Minimum of three (3) years of fieldwork management experience, and preferably experience running a research project at an academically-oriented, development economics research organisation.
• Strong track record of success in academic studies, as well as the professional workplace.