Senior Manager, New Program Development at Evidence Action

About The Role

• Our Accelerator is the engine for new programs. It is a venture-style, stage-gated pipeline that finds the most promising health interventions and develops the strongest into programs ready to scale. Only about 2% of the interventions we evaluate make it through, and those that do have gone on to raise over $100 million.
• The New Program Development (NPD) team drives this work. We source and vet new ideas, dig into the evidence and cost-effectiveness, build partnerships with researchers, governments, and implementers, and test concepts in the field to turn the best ideas into real programs.
• We are hiring a Senior Manager to lead the development of our next generation of health programs.
• You will own a set of early-stage interventions and drive each one from a research insight to a program that is proven, fundable, and ready to scale, or to a clear and well-reasoned decision to stop. You bring the rigor of an analyst who can interrogate evidence honestly and reason carefully under uncertainty.
• You also bring the drive of a builder who can source opportunities, cultivate partnerships, and turn ideas into programs that work in the real world.
• Together, those strengths let you find and build the interventions that deliver the most health impact for every dollar spent. You will join a close-knit team that puts evidence first, thinks big, acts urgently, and is willing to challenge convention to reach more people. You will report to the Accelerator Director with a dotted line to the West Africa Regional Lead.

Key Responsibilities

• Own a portfolio of pipeline interventions, end to end. Drive several promising candidate programs through the Accelerator's stage-gate process, and decide what advances, what gets reshaped, and what exits our pipeline
• Interrogate the evidence with honesty. Assess each intervention's evidence base on the merits, including effect sizes and their quality, external validity, variability, negative and contradictory findings, and gaps.
• Model impact and cost-effectiveness under uncertainty. Partner with the Cost-Effectiveness team to build and pressure-test CEAs, reasoning explicitly about assumptions, sensitivity, and uncertainty, and translating them into clear go/no-go implications
• Design and run decision-relevant learning in close collaboration with our MLE team. Scope and execute lean, rigorous field activities such as scoping, formative research, and pilots, to unblock decisions
• Build the case and align stakeholders. Craft compelling, evidence-grounded investment cases. Bring researchers, implementers, governments, and donors along, anticipate objections, unblock barriers, and create momentum
• Collaborate across Evidence Action. Work hand in hand with our Growth team to build necessary resourcing and funding, relevant Program teams who bring the implementation muscle, and the Country Teams who cultivate and manage the policy and government partnerships in the places we work
• Be Evidence Action's face with partners. Independently lead conversations with study authors, implementing organizations, government officials, and funders, and use those relationships to source new ideas and partnerships
• Strengthen the Accelerator's methods, AI-enabled workflows, and quality bar, and mentor analysts and interns on the workstreams you lead.

Requirements

• You have a Bachelor`s Degree and 6 - 10 years of experience in quant social science, program management, international development, or global health in a cross-country setting
• You read primary research and study design critically, synthesize large and conflicting evidence bases, and form an honest view of what the evidence does and does not support
• You build or rigorously interpret cost-effectiveness, epidemiological, or statistical models, and reason clearly about assumptions, sensitivity, and uncertainty
• You design lean learning activities that target the uncertainty actually blocking a decision, and you deliver them on a timeline
• You move things forward amid uncertainty, building, prototyping, and unblocking rather than waiting for perfect information
• You build trust and align both internal teams and external partners (researchers, implementers, government, and donors) across cultures and sectors toward a shared path
• You make complex technical findings clear and decision-useful for non-technical audiences, in writing and live
• You manage several workstreams at once, sequence sharply, and make defensible calls about where to spend scarce time
• You have experience working in an international setting and working with diverse teams
• You look for the reasons your favorite idea might be wrong, and welcome the same scrutiny of your own work.