Current Opportunities at Busara Center

Role Purpose Statement:

• The Senior Associate supports both the advisory and research arms of Busara by leading the execution of Busara projects. While the role will mainly involve research and advisory in inclusive finance, they may be expected to contribute to other portfolios. 
• As the primary project manager and technical lead for all external Busara projects, a Senior Associate quickly gains an expert understanding of the project, challenges, relationships, and research questions and uses best practices and tools, both within and outside Busara to execute the highest degree, with careful consideration of timelines and budget.  They view research problems with a behavioral lens and have good intuition about potential barriers and levers while drawing on problem-specific and general behavioral science knowledge.
• The Senior Associate works directly with clients and partners and takes ownership of the overall project and its end products. The Senior Associate directly manages and effectively coordinates other project staff that works on their project as well as liaises with other Busara teams. This includes strong upward management skills to engage the Project Division’s vice presidents on substantive components of the project.
• The Senior Associate works closely with Busara leaders  and  directly with  researchers, clients, and partners  to perform a variety of tasks including, but not limited to:

Research Design and Execution

• Design high-quality qualitative, quantitative, or experimental research, which takes into account key sampling, instrument, research integrity, ethics, analysis, and intervention considerations on a variety of internal and external projects.
• Incorporate behavioral science into research projects. 
• Leads the design and iteration of prototypes.
• Execute the core project responsibilities with the highest degree with respect to creativity, rigor, relevance, detail, and timeliness.

Project Oversight and Leadership:

• Maintain an understanding of the high-level engagement, the goals of the clients, partners, and teams within Busara, and continually push the project teams to realign around those goals.
• Manage the most sensitive or complex projects, typically of medium to large-scale research and advisory projects, end to end, with minimal supervision or support.
• Engage the leadership team and align on substantive components of the project
• Lead or support Associates and Analysts to fulfill engagement requirements.
• Develop and manage the execution of project plans, budgets, work plans, and task schedules.
• Manage resources, financials, and adhere to the project plan throughout the full project life cycle.
• Monitor, track, and control outcomes to resolve issues, dependencies, and critical path deliverables.
• Manage project kick-off, on-boarding, and off-boarding for knowledge management.
• Responsible for project timelines, deliverables, reports, and staffing.
• Monitor and review project team performance.

External Relationship management:

• Manage higher-level conversations and partnerships with clients and partners.
• Plan, manage, and execute external and internal engagements from start to finish with minimal supervisory engagement.
• Serve as a point of contact for clients and partners and effectively manage the needs of stakeholders through proactive communication and troubleshooting.
• Identify opportunities to deepen engagement with clients and partners. 
• Present at conferences, networking events, or client meetings.

People management and organizational engagement:

• Ensure the engagement of direct and indirect reports by driving the development and nurture of Busara’s culture and values and overseeing efforts related to their well-being
• Contribute to skills-building for projects’ teams and other teams as required.
• Manage performance and serve as mentors to Associates, Analysts, and Project team members, as required.
• Serve as champions for the projects team, manage the team, and bring forward all relevant and actionable requests to the leadership team.
• Maintain team morale and organizational alignment
• Coordinate hiring and onboarding of Analysts, Interns, and new Associates as needed.
• Coordinate across teams to ensure healthy work relationships are maintained.  Mediate and escalate (to supervisors, people, or wellness teams) any issues that require attention.
• Communicate across organizational teams to ensure a healthy and functioning organization.
• Contribute to the design, execution, and dissemination of Busara internal research projects and initiatives
• Perform any other duty as may be assigned by the Engagement Director or equivalent

Knowledge, Skills, and Experience: Minimum Requirements

• A Bachelor’s degree in Economics, Social Sciences, Public Policy, or related fields. 
• Strong qualitative, quantitative, research, and data analytic skills.
• Proficient project management skills.
• 2-3 years’ previous work experience in financial inclusion/research in financial services
• Strong academic behavioral science background.
• Extensive experience managing large-scale projects in developing countries.
• Demonstrated ability to manage high-level relationships with partner organizations.
• Strong quantitative skills including knowledge of and experience working with data analysis software
• Excellent management and organizational skills.
• Flexible, self-motivating, able to manage multiple tasks efficiently, and a team player.
• Interest and experience working in a fast-paced working environment.
• Fluency and excellent communication and writing skills with a mastery of English.
• Ability to execute projects while sustaining a global focus and vision for institutional planning and decision-making.

Desired qualifications:

• A Master’s degree in Economics, Social Sciences, Public Policy, or related fields is strongly preferred.
• Experience managing or mentoring staff.
• Technical understanding and practical experience of qualitative research and human-centered design techniques.
• Technical understanding and practical experience of randomized controlled trials and/or quasi-experimental designs
• Experience in applying behavioral science to real-world problems.
• Proficiency in Stata, R, or Python

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What you’ll do

• Lead a team of behavioral researchers (quantitative and qualitative) to design and execute behavioral science projects across the Global South. This includes research design, field work, and data analysis techniques, and optimization.  In short - do awesome behavioral science.
• Work with your team to develop and deliver internal  training, workshops, and resources to enhance the skills and capabilities of Busarians.  In other words – help others do awesome work. 
• Identify and pursue specific areas where Busara, and your team, can advance the field of behavioral science: not in fine-turning the research on a specific cognitive mechanism, but in making our field more effective and thoughtful about ethical behavior change. 
• Developing a research and partnership agenda that drives those innovative areas forward. Busara has a unique opportunity (in the breadth of projects across the world) and incentives (as a non-profit, social mission organization) to reimagine our field, but it’s nevertheless a challenging and complex process to do so.
• Build relationships throughout the field, to both raise funds for this agenda, and to partner with like-minded organizations. 
• Think, write, and speak about new methods and approaches that Busara can benefit from.  These could be existing methods in the field, or new ones that you develop at Busara.
• Create and improve standards and methods for research design, methodologies, and quality assurance throughout Busara. This includes Listen to and learn from the technical needs of fellow Busarians, to ensure that what your team offers serves these needs. 
• Partner with other Directors and VPs to help them conceptualize, source and pursue opportunities for projects.

To do this well, you should have:

• Deep expertise in behavioral science: from experimental design, to qualitative field work, to design methodologies.  
• A strong understanding of how these methods work in the field: with partial data, hard to reach populations, sensitive research topics, biased enumerators, etc. 
• Enjoyment and expertise in applied behavioral science, including cognitive and experimental psychology and behavioral and experimental economics.    
• Experience with the realities of behavioral field work: how to take academic knowledge into a practical process for designing interventions, when the environment can’t be controlled or fully understood.
• Extensive hand-on experience with qualitative research and design: with a detailed knowledge of the strength and limitations of various techniques, if not day to day execution experience. 
• Management experience, especially of diverse teams and multiple geographies
• The knowledge and temperament to be an internal consultant: listening and responding to the technical needs of your colleagues and clients
• The desire to work and live in the Global South (if you’re from here, or have experience here that’s best) 
• Excellent management and organizational skills; you and your team will need to effectively juggle a wide range of requests for help across the organization
• Fluent written and spoken English. Other languages are great too, but English is required.
• Ideally, sectoral expertise in a substantive area such as: health, financial services, gender, social inclusion, governance, agriculture.