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

Clinton Health Access Initiative - Founded in 2002, by President William J. Clinton and Ira Magaziner, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc. (“CHAI”) is a global health organization committed to strengthening integrated health systems and expanding access to care and treatment in the developing world. CHAI’s solution-oriented approach focuses on improving market dynamics for medicines and diagnostics; lowering prices for treatment; accelerating access to lifesaving technologies; and helping governments build the capacity required for high-quality care and treatment programs.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Research Associate, Epidemiologist, West, Central and East Africa

Job Reference: 2
Location: Abuja
Job Type: Full Time
Program (Division): Infectious Disease - Global Malaria

Overview
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

• Manage and implement analytical projects related to malaria epidemiology, intervention and surveillance, as required;
• Design and implement operational research projects: identifying knowledge gaps, defining research questions, protocol development, survey and sampling design, formulating training material, training and monitoring survey data collectors, data management, analysis, and dissemination;
• Organize and merge available data, assessing its quality and suitability for analysis, data management, conduct statistical analyses (generally descriptive), and present data in the form of charts and maps;
• In collaboration with country teams, provide analytical support to the National Malaria Program and its Information Management and Surveillance Units to help strengthen the new malaria surveillance platform, including improving data collection, data management, analysis, and data visualization;
• Develop and conduct monitoring and evaluation for ongoing projects, including support for the monitoring and evaluation of existing and new surveillance platforms in collaboration with the health informatics malaria team at CHAI;
• Provide technical supervision, training and ongoing support to staff members involved in monitoring and evaluation activities or study implementation;
• Synthesize results through high-quality presentations, reports, and publications and translate them to national and sub-national partners to support evidence-based decision making, as well as internally and externally at international venues;
• Provide ad-hoc programmatic support to country teams in service of government partners; this includes but is not limited to: program material review (e.g., training, data collection tools), report generation and program data analysis;
•  Develop and maintain strong working relationships with key country stakeholders across government, non-governmental organizations, and local academic institutions, with support from program managers; and
• Any other tasks identified.

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).

Application Closing Date
Not Specified.

Method of Application
Interested and qualified candidates should:
Click here to apply online