The Role
This is a role with two connected mandates under one leader.
You will lead the generation and use of evidence throughout the program lifecycle in close collaboration with programs, while maintaining an independence in your assessment of evidence, surfacing uncomfortable findings when necessary. Bringing these together in one senior role reporting directly to the CEO gives evidence a genuine, empowered voice in our decision-making.
In this role, you will sit on Evidence Action''s Global Leadership Team (GLT), which sets organizational strategy and direction. This is a pivotal opportunity for an executive who can navigate complexity, inspire high-performing teams, and translate evidence into action, driving measurable improvements in millions of lives for years to come.
How You Will Make An Impact
Lead a holistic evidence function:
Oversee the technical and strategic aspects of our evidence teams, ensuring MLE, cost-effectiveness modeling, and epidemiology connect into a single, coherent picture that informs day-to-day program improvement and major decisions, rather than separate streams of analysis
In collaboration with GLT and program leads, set a cross-program evidence strategy, defining the questions Evidence Action is answering across its portfolio, matching the right methodological approaches and connecting evidence to both delivery and organizational learning
Serve as a technical thought partner to teams across Evidence Action, making evidence more readily visible and actionable across the organization, evolving our cost-effectiveness tooling to enhance visibility into what drives cost-effectiveness and shortening the feedback loop between realized costs and impact and our projected impact.
Champion evidence across a program''s lifecycle, ensuring we''re designing the right evidence generation to feed lessons into scaling decisions and evolving our cost-effectiveness tools so organizational leaders understand what drives cost-effectiveness and we can actualize modeled impact
Institutionalize monitoring and learning (e.g. A/B testing) in programs so performance keeps improving well beyond launch
Sharpen where Evidence Action''s own evidence generation is uniquely valuable versus where other partners are better placed.
Own independent quality assurance:
Understand how different evidence sources come together across programs to model our impact, and establish and enforce minimum standards for addressing weak evidence, uncertainty, and assumptions in that modeling
Design and implement the systems that let us review evidence consistently across our portfolio, including program stage gates and structured evidence and programmatic reviews at key decision points
Own data quality assurance so it is structurally independent from evidence generation, setting methodology standards, commissioning re-surveys and integrity checks, and surfacing issues early and transparently
Provide evidence-based recommendations that inform program scale-up, ongoing iteration, and wind-down decisions, holding a strong voice in those decisions while partnering with program and regional leaders who bring essential local context.
Strengthen technical capability and relieve program teams:
Build internal technical management capacity that benefit our programs
Lead a multi-disciplinary function through consolidation and change, building trust across MLE, cost-effectiveness, and epidemiology teams and bringing our people along through a significant transition
Identify where AI and modern data tools can strengthen evidence generation and decision-making at scale.
Represent Evidence Action externally:
Serve as a senior organizational voice on evidence, engaging donors, the board, and technical partners on our evidence philosophy, methodological choices, and standing evaluation arrangements
Champion a transparent culture that shares learning; including learning from what does not work, both inside the organization and with the relevant external stakeholders
Who You Are:
We are looking for a leader with rigorous technical training who has spent much of their career as a user and steward of evidence in real implementation settings, not primarily as an academic researcher.
Essential
The courage to act on evidence. You are willing to surface uncomfortable findings to senior leadership and to recommend a change of course when the evidence calls for it
Technical leadership and management at scale. You have led similar technical teams, upholding quality assurance, in low- and middle-income country contexts with a grounding in operational rigor
Program-implementation grounding. You pair academic research expertise with genuine operational experience, so you lead as an insider rather than from a distance.
Technical credibility and range.
A PhD or equivalent quantitative expertise that lets you judge the quality of evidence produced, hold teams to a high technical bar, draw on a range of analytical methods, and speak with authority alongside senior technical staff and external partners.
Must have a background in cost-effectiveness or health economics, or the judgment to bring in the right experts
A strong leader of teams and change. You can conceptualize change management and bring people along, delegate across a large scope, and build trust across teams and cultures.
What this role is not:
This is not an audit or compliance role. This role is intended to build the systems and structures that reinforce the appropriate generation and application of evidence as programs evolve, so evidence becomes more than just a box we check
This is not a publication engine. External research is not the primary goal of this work
This is not a remote or distant role. Field presence and proximity to implementation are design requirements