Workplan management and reporting 10% 

• Collaborate with the partner’s team to develop a shared work plan, ensuring alignment with project goals and effective implementation.
• Support with other project management tasks, including progress tracking, financial oversight , and internal and donor reporting.

Stakeholder management 20%

• Cultivate relationships with key local top-level decision-makers and ensure the project has their sustained buy-in and input.
• Coordinate project activities alongside technical staff from the partner in a learning-by-doing approach, fostering active engagement throughout the process.
• Promote engagement to raise awareness of the lab and encourage collaborative efforts for collective impact.

Generating relevant evidence 30%

• Lead the co-creation of a policy-driven research agenda for the lab, and facilitate the development of research projects to respond to the agenda
• Facilitate engagement with local and international academics to provide input into the lab’ s policy-driven research agenda
• Develop opportunities to leverage administrative data for research, connecting local and international researchers to pursue these openings.
• Manage research projects end to end: define research objectives and questions, develop protocols, supervise data collection and analysis, and ensure quality control at all stages.
• Provide hands-on support to collect, clean, structure, and analyze large-scale administrative or survey data.
• Design and deliver hands-on workshops covering data processing (e.g., merging, cleaning, wrangling) and analysis (e.g., descriptive statistics, dashboards, advanced techniques), using tools like Excel, Stata, R, or Python.
• Establish standard operating procedures and documentation protocols so partner staff can independently maintain and update data processes over time.

Sharing evidence to inform program design and delivery 20%

• Share existing evidence to inform partner’s program design and delivery. 
• Develop user-friendly data dashboards, visualizations, or summaries for top-level decision-makers, ensuring that complex results are accessible and directly inform program design.
• Produce policy briefs on key policy questions.
• Work together with the partner , the project team, sector team, global policy and communications teams to lead and/or participate in strategic events for policy purposes, including but not limited to summits, conferences, workshops, technical working groups, and round tables.
• In collaboration with researchers and in support of the country director, represent IPA locally in policy conversations and at events.

 Exploring program institutionalization 20%

• Engage with the partner’s leadership to explore opportunities to institutionalize the lab for sustainability.

Qualifications

Required

• Bachelor’s Degree and /or Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in international public policy, social science, economics, statistics, or related fields and 3-7 years of relevant work experience. Exceptions may be made for excellent candidates who do not meet this criterion.
• Proficiency in statistical software (Stata, R, or Python) for data cleaning, analysis, and visualization.
• Experience working with large administrative datasets, building dashboards, or automating data pipelines
• Hands-on experience supporting Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning systems.
• Proven experience managing multiple research projects simultaneously, including timelines, deliverables, and budgets, preferably in a development or policy context.
• Robust understanding of both quantitative and qualitative research methods.
• Demonstrated ability to coach and train others in statistics, data analysis or MEL methodologies.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, including the ability to present information in a structured, non-technical, and insightful way.
• Experience working in the telecommunications sector, ideally in close interaction with government stakeholders.
• Superior analytical, quantitative, and conceptual thinking skills.
• Willingness to be a team player and identify connections between work streams.
• Cultural and political sensitivity and demonstrated ability to work successfully with diverse constituencies.
• Passion for making data-driven decision-making a reality in the development sector.