Consultancy to Serve as a Survey Statistician/Data Analyst at Palladium Group

Project Overview and Role   

• Health Policy Plus (HP+) is a USAID-funded five-year project awarded on August 28, 2015. HP+ has a mandate across global, country, and subnational levels to strengthen and advance health policy priorities in family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH), HIV, and maternal health. It aims to improve the enabling environment for equitable and sustainable health services, supplies, and delivery systems through policy development and implementation, with an emphasis on voluntary, rights-based health programs, and by strengthening in-country partners’ capacity to navigate complex environments for effective policy design, implementation, and financing aligned to their priorities.
• In Nigeria, HP+ is working with the State Ministries of Health of Abia, Ebonyi and Osun states to conduct a Household Health Expenditure Survey. The Household Health Expenditure Survey will be focused on quantifying and determining the patterns of private health expenditure for the focus states. The HHES analysis will also provide a means of determining variations in private health expenditure in the states that are typically masked by national-level, aggregated data and will improve the body of evidence required to diagnose issues and develop responsive polices and interventions, that will set Abia, Osun and Ebonyi on the path to improving the health financing landscape in their states.
• HP+ Nigeria is implementing the survey through a research firm, Health Systems Consult Limited (HSCL). Survey implementation kicked off in July 2019 and data collection is currently ongoing in the 3 states with a plan to have a complete dataset by 27 July 2019.
• Consequently, HP+ Nigeria is seeking a qualified consultant to support the cleaning and management of the dataset in readiness for analysis.

Responsibilities
The specific responsibilities of the selected consultant will be to:

• Work with the contracted survey research firm, HSCL, to ensure the datasets are cleaned, variable and value labeled, and organized in a systematic and consistent manner.
• Merge the separate OOP and WTP datasets into one consolidated dataset using agreed unique household identifiers while ensuring there are no errors or loss of data. The clean, individual (OOP and WTP) datasets AND the clean, merged dataset must be delivered to HP+ separately.
• Analyze the dataset to determine the frequency and trends of missing values and make necessary adjustments in line with best practices in statistics and data science. (All original variable values, including missing values, MUST be preserved in the final dataset delivered to HP+. Variables for which any observation has been filled, e.g. to fill missing values, should be given a separate name. For example, “age” and “age_filled”.
• As advised by HP+, create and label new variables which may combine values obtained from multiple variables into one variable, recode continuous variables into categorical variables or recode categorical variables into dichotomous variables. As specified above, all original variable values, MUST be preserved in the final dataset delivered to HP+.
• Create a weight variable specific to each state dataset to ensure that aggregated state-level analyses are truly representative of the state population.
• Working with HP+ staff and a Statistical Analysis Plan, analyze the dataset and prepare required frequency tables and models. Adjust analysis as required based on consultation with HP+ staff and ensure the delivery of analytical output to fulfill the research objectives
• Conduct a 2 -day training on Stata fundamentals, using the household dataset, for HP+ Nigeria staff
• Maintain a log and do file of all commands used to clean, label, prepare and analyze the final dataset for delivery to HP+.
• The consultant will be required to work with the Stata statistical package.

Key Deliverables
The deliverables for this engagement are:

• A clean, prepared dataset ready for analysis and an accompanying log and do-file of all commands.
• A codebook with clear descriptions of each variable within the dataset
• Analytical output from the survey dataset in the required table formats

The expected period of performance for this engagement is 25 days in August and September 2019.

Requirements
Qualifications Required:

• Bachelor's Degree in areas such as Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related subjects
• Experience in cleaning, managing and analyzing datasets for large-scale household surveys
• Proficiency in the use of Stata
• Detail oriented with an eye for quality
• Demonstrated experience in facilitating training sessions on statistical packages
• Previous experience of HP+ research activities in Nigeria is an advantage.

Payment Milestones

• Payment will be made after satisfactory completion of this assignment and submission of all deliverables stated above.