Research Associate, Epidemiologist, West, Central and East Africa at Clinton Health Access Initiative

Malaria is one of the world's most important causes of illness, death, and lost economic productivity. Over the past decade, dramatic increases in donor funding have facilitated scale-up of effective interventions to prevent, diagnosis, and treat malaria. This investment has successfully reduced the burden of malaria in many settings, and some countries have begun planning to eliminate it altogether. CHAI’s global malaria program provides direct management and technical support to countries around the globe to strengthen their malaria programs and reduce the burden of this preventable, treatable disease.

In parts of West, Central and East Africa, CHAI provides technical and managerial assistance to national malaria programs in order to accelerate policy changes, ensure sufficient supply commodities, generate demand among health providers and patients and ensure adequate monitoring and troubleshooting mechanisms are in place to track progress. Over the last few years, CHAI has also expanded its support to include surveillance and is helping national malaria programs in this region to identify the bottlenecks and potential solutions to improve the collection, reporting, analysis and use of data for programmatic decision-making.

Overview of Role:

CHAI is seeking a highly motivated individual with strong public health experience and analytical skills to support the expanded surveillance and analytics scope of work across West, Central and East Africa, with an initial focus on Nigeria and Uganda. Specific analytical projects will include:

• Design and implementation support for operational research (with an emphasis on monitoring and evaluation), study protocol oversight and IRB applications, study design and implementation, and data analysis.
• Design, roll-out and evaluation of electronic surveillance tools and processes in the private sector, documenting technical lessons learnt for potential scale-up.
• Key indicator and other analysis of routine data as required for project and program planning and implementation, as well as to support evidence generation and proposal preparation.
• The individual will work with team members across CHAI’s Global, Regional and Country Malaria Teams and will therefore need to possess strong communication and organizational skills. It is expected that the Epidemiologist will need to collaborate with government programs, academics and public health agencies to ensure CHAI’s work is complementary and not duplicative.

Responsibilities

Qualifications

• Master's degree in Public Health, Epidemiology or related field preferred;

• 1+ years of working experience in related fields;

• Knowledge of malaria and/or other major global infectious disease problems;

• Experience conducting and managing epidemiological surveys;

• Experience in the epidemiological and spatial analysis of health data;

• Experience in monitoring and evaluation of surveillance systems and/or public health programs;

• Familiarity with disease surveillance and strengthening information systems;

• High levels of proficiency in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and internet applications;

• Statistical and geospatial analysis programming experience (R, SAS, STATA, ArcGIS and/or other relevant software);

• Experience working and communicating with government officials and other external partners;

• Ability to work independently in remote and unstructured settings and to adapt to new environments and challenges;

• Ability to collaborate and operate as part of a multi-cultural team;

• Exceptional written and oral communication skills; 

• Enthusiasm for applying research methods to solve global health problems; and

• Willingness to travel (40-50% of time)

Advantages:

• Experience working in fast-paced, output-oriented environments;
• Experience living or working in resource-limited settings;
• Experience working with a decentralized team;
• Experience working with surveillance platforms (e.g. DHIS2), data collection tools (e.g. ODK) and/or data visualization applications (e.g. Tableau).