Embedded Lab Manager at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA)

• Location: The duty station is Abuja, Nigeria. The role requires willingness to travel within Nigeria up to 10% of the time.
• Reports To: Associate Director, Policy (IPA Nigeria), with dotted-line oversight from IPA’s Global Policy team and the Financial Inclusion Program (FIP).

Job Summary

• IPA Nigeria is seeking an Embedded Lab Manager to work closely with government institutions and other sector stakeholders to strengthen their capacity to generate, interpret, and use evidence to improve policies and programmes.
• The Embedded Lab Manager will strengthen Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) systems and government data systems, foster institutional ownership of evidence-informed decision-making, and translate evidence into actionable insights through policy briefs and presentations.
• The role leads a team of associates who support government partners in building their data systems and analytical capacity, and reports to the Associate Director, Policy, with dotted-line oversight from IPA’s Global Policy team and the Financial Inclusion Program (FIP).

Responsibilities
Workplan management, reporting and stakeholder engagement (20%):

• Collaborate with the partner’s team to develop a shared work plan, ensuring alignment with project goals and effective implementation.
• Support other project management tasks, including progress tracking, financial oversight, and internal and donor reporting.
• Cultivate relationships with key local top-level decision makers and ensure the project has 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 (40%):

• Lead the co-creation of a policy-driven research agenda for the regulatory partners and guide the development of analytically rigorous research projects that generate actionable, data-driven insights.
• Facilitate engagement with local and international academics and technical experts to strengthen partners’ policy-driven research agendas, including advancing robust analytical methods and data use.
• Identify and develop opportunities to leverage administrative and other large-scale datasets for policy-relevant research, including structuring data access, preparing datasets for analysis, and connecting local and international researchers to pursue these opportunities.
• Manage research projects end-to-end: define research objectives and analytical frameworks, develop protocols, oversee data collection and management systems, supervise statistical analysis, and ensure data quality, reproducibility, and methodological rigor at all stages.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership in collecting, cleaning, structuring, integrating, and analysing large and complex administrative or survey datasets, applying reproducible workflows and best practices in data management.
• Design and deliver hands-on workshops to build partners’ capacity in data engineering and analytics, including data pipelines, data merging and wrangling, statistical analysis, and dashboard or visual tool development, using platforms such as Power BI, Tableau, Stata, R, or Python.
• Develop and implement analytical and data-visualisation systems (dashboards) that translate raw data into clear, actionable insights for decision-makers, including automated reporting and interactive dashboards where appropriate.
• Establish and institutionalise standard operating procedures, documentation, and reproducible analytical workflows so partner staff can independently maintain, update, and scale data systems over time.

Sharing evidence to inform program design and delivery (20%):

• Share existing evidence to inform the 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, and 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

• Master’s degree in economics, development, international relations, public administration, public policy, or a closely related field strongly preferred; additional experience will be accepted in place of a master’s degree. (preferred)
• 5+ years of relevant experience analyzing and communicating complex research results to various audiences, including at least 1 year working closely with government or large NGO partners in a low- or middle-income country (LMIC) context.
• Knowledge of the Nigerian policy-making process and government structures, or demonstrated experience building that knowledge quickly in a new country context.
• Knowledge of and demonstrated experience in the use of rigorous evidence for international development policy.
• Strong quantitative skills, including the ability to understand academic research studies and analyze bodies of research.
• Excellent communication skills, including clear, precise, non-technical written and presentation skills, with a strong written voice and effective spoken communication style.
• Proven ability to multitask and complete projects on tight deadlines with limited supervision.
• Experience supervising staff and managing multiple concurrent engagements.
• Strong ability to manage up and across, coordinating effectively with the Associate Director, Policy, the Global Policy team, and research staff.
• Professional working proficiency in English (fluency).
• Experience with IPA and/or partner institutions. (preferred)
• Experience as part of a government team, as a researcher, or with monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL). (preferred)
• Experience in agriculture, education, financial inclusion, or social protection. (preferred).