Fresh Jobs at Busara Center for Behavioral Economics

Key Accountabilities/Responsibilities

CORE PROJECT RESPONSIBILITIES:

Associates will work closely with Busara offices and directly with academic researchers and advisory clients to perform a variety of tasks including, but not limited to:

• Engage in multiple large-scale research and advisory projects at a given time.
• Plan, manage, and execute external and internal engagements independently from start to finish with limited supervision.
• Incorporate the latest research in qualitative and quantitative methods, behavioral science, psychology, economics, and development to provide creative solutions to engagements.
• Manage and conduct qualitative and quantitative research and data analysis.
• Design, launch, and analyze effective quantitative and qualitative survey instruments with coordination among project staff (Analysts, Project Leads, Data and Programming, and Operations teams).
• Serve as a point of contact for clients and partners.  Effectively manage the needs of stakeholders through proactive communication and troubleshooting.
• Contribute to project on-boarding and off-boarding for knowledge management.
• Responsible for project timelines, deliverables, reports, and staffing.
• Contribute to the creation of proposals, concept notes, and pitch decks for new business opportunities and knowledge sharing. Present at conferences, networking events, or client meetings.
• Contribute to the design, execution, and dissemination of Busara internal research projects.
• Work closely to lead or support other Associates to fulfill engagement requirements.
• Perform any other duty as may be assigned by the project supervisor.

CORE ORGANIZATIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES:

In addition to project responsibilities, Associates also have the following organizational responsibilities to ensure a healthy and functioning organization.

• Work with the Associate team to conduct goal-setting exercises, objectives and key results, and team building events.
• Contribute to skills-building workshops for Associate teams.
• Assist with internal initiatives where necessary.
• Serve as mentors to Analysts and Project Lead team members, when requested.

Knowledge, Skills, and Experience: Minimum Requirements

• A Bachelor’s degree in Economics, Social Sciences, Public Policy, or related fields; Clear interest in health focused research and behavioral science.
• Strong qualitative, quantitative, research, and data analytic skills.
• 2+ years previous work experience in health focused research.
• Experience managing large scale research and consulting projects in developing countries.
• Demonstrates the ability to manage high-level relationships with partner organizations.
• Strong quantitative skills including knowledge of and experience working with data analysis software (STATA, Python, R)
• Experience managing and mentoring staff
• Ability to quickly understand and adapt to new contextual situations
• Excellent management and organizational skills.
• Flexible, self-motivating, able to manage multiple tasks efficiently, and a team player.
• Interest and experience working in a fast-paced working environment.
• Fluency and excellent communication and writing skills with a mastery of English.
• Ability to execute projects while sustaining a global focus and vision for institutional planning and decision making.

Desired Qualifications:

• A Master’s degree in Economics, Social Sciences, Public Policy, or related fields.
• Experience managing or mentoring staff.
• Familiarity with randomized controlled trials and/or quasi-experimental designs
• Technical understanding of qualitative research techniques.
• Strong academic behavioral science background.
• Knowledge of the application of behavioral science to real-world problems.

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Job Description

• The quantitative Technical Director leads a team with two main responsibilities: to enable the rest of Busara to engage in high-quality quantitative work, and to pitch in and conduct particularly complex analyses themselves.  
• You and your team enable Busarians through our ongoing internal training program, through tool development, and through active mentoring and guidance.  
• Projects you and your team work directly contribute to include: complex experimental design and analyses, heterogeneous effects, and multi-level structural analyses of behavioral dynamics. 

Roles and responsibilities:

• Lead a small team of experts to directly contribute to behavioral science projects across the Global South. This includes quantitative research design, methodologies, and data analysis techniques, and optimizing research.  In short - do awesome quantitative work.
• Work with your team and our qualitative technical group to develop and deliver internal training, workshops, and resources to enhance the skills and capabilities of Busarians.  In other words – help others do awesome quantitative work. 
• Listen to and learn from the technical needs of fellow Busarians, to ensure that what your team offers serves these needs. 
• Help Busara leverage data and insights effectively, fostering cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing.
• Create and improve standards and methods for research design, methodologies, and quality assurance.
• Collaborate closely with internal and external stakeholders to ensure high technical standards. and promote best practices..
• Interface with clients, to explore their technical needs, and talk with them about the results and implications of projects in the field
• Partner with VPs and Directors to source and pursue opportunities for contracts 
• Think, write, and speak about new methods and approaches that Busara can benefit from.  These could be existing methods in the field, or new ones that you develop at Busara.

Requirements:

• Deep expertise in quantitative methods: from experimental design and research to statistical inference. Ideally, this includes machine learning and simulation approaches.
• A strong understanding of how these methods work in the field: with partial data, incomplete treatment compliance, biased enumerators, etc. 
• Enjoyment and expertise in applied behavioral science, including cognitive and experimental psychology and behavioral and experimental economics.    
• Experience with the realities of behavioral fieldwork: how to take academic knowledge into a practical process for designing interventions, when the environment can’t be controlled or fully understood
• Extensive hands-on experience with applied data science: converting data into insights
• Management experience, especially of diverse teams and multiple geographies
• The knowledge and temperament to be an internal consultant: listening and responding to the technical needs of your colleagues and clients
• The desire to work in the Global South (if you’re from here, or have experience here that’s best) 
• Excellent management and organizational skills; you and your team will need to effectively juggle a wide range of requests for help across the organization
• Fluent in written and spoken English. Other languages are great too, but English is required.
• Ideally, sectoral expertise in one of our focus areas: Health, Financial Services, Gender, Social Inclusion, Governance, and Agriculture.
• However, we’d learned that many applicants like to have a “benchmark” for the level of expertise that’s needed for a role. 
• Here, it would be training equivalent of a Master’s degree in Behavioral Science, Economics, Social Sciences, Public Policy, or related fields (and ideally a PhD in these fields); and experience equivalent to 4+ years of applied data science & behavioral science work.