Research Associate – The Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc. (CHAI) 923 views

The Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc. (CHAI) is a global health organization committed to saving lives and reducing the burden of disease in low-and middle-income countries, while strengthening the capabilities of governments and the private sector in those countries to create and sustain high-quality health systems that can succeed without our assistance. For more information, please visit: http://www.clintonhealthaccess.org.

 

CHAI’s global malaria program provides direct technical and operational support to countries around the globe to strengthen their malaria programs and reduce the burden of this preventable, treatable disease. We support governments to scale up effective interventions for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and surveillance, with the goals of sustainably reducing the number of malaria-related illnesses and deaths worldwide in the short-term and accelerating progress towards malaria elimination in the long term.

 

Overview of Role:

CHAI is seeking a Research Associate to provide technical assistance in support of malaria analytics and surveillance programs in CHAI focus countries in the southern Africa region. The position requires a highly motivated individual with outstanding analytical, problem-solving, organizational, and communication skills. S/he must exhibit a passion for results and commitment to excellence. The candidate must have excellent communications skills, patience, and cultural sensitivity, as s/he will be working on complex topics with global and country partners as well as multiple teams at CHAI.

 

The successful Research Associate will have strong organizational and project management skills, and will be capable of conducting rapid quantitative analysis and communicating such analysis in a clear and concise manner to colleagues and partners. The successful candidate will be able to function efficiently in a semi-independent setting, and thus will be a self-motivated individual capable of managing multiple tasks at once and driving multiple work flows forward, with the malaria program best interests in mind.

 

CHAI places great value on the following qualities in its staff: resourcefulness, responsibility, patience, tenacity, humility, independence, energy, and work ethic.

 

The responsibilities include supporting CHAI to conduct robust analytics, strengthen surveillance gaps, identify drivers of malaria transmission, and monitor progress to elimination, in order to ensure that all potential malaria cases observed by health system are tested, treated, and reported appropriately, and that high level of coverage is achieved and monitored with evidence-based interventions in the required places.

Manage analytical projects related to malaria epidemiology, intervention and surveillance:

• Lead data management: organizing and merging data of variable cleanliness and file type (e.g. text files, Excel files, GIS databases), analysis and facilitate review of data access, availability, and quality, managing data security, and being an effective point-person for any questions or requests related to malaria data in Southern Africa.

• Independently conduct statistical analyses of key epidemiological, entomological and intervention indicators including but not limited to basic statistics, descriptive analysis and simple regression, and be able to reproduce and clearly communicate methods.
• With supervision, support advanced analyses related to malaria elimination, for example: multi-variate analyses to understand factors associated with malaria burden, predictive risk mapping analyses and human movement assessments.
• Produce clear and compelling visualizations (e.g. simple Excel dashboards and descriptive maps) of sub-national, national, and regional surveillance data and related data such as census population and other demographic data to support decision-making for malaria elimination.

 

Contribute to the design and implementation of monitoring and evaluation in order to measure progress towards malaria elimination:

• Conduct data analysis of key indicators, for monitoring and evaluation protocols that are internal to CHAI, part of routine MoH processes or required for donor reporting.
• Work closely with CHAI’s health informatics team to design and implement monitoring and evaluation of surveillance platforms.

 

Participate in research and discussion of topics relevant for the goal of malaria elimination

 

Contribute to the implementation of training activities:

• Formulate national and sub-national level training materials with a focus on analytical content e.g. data management best practices, online data collection tools, basic mapping in QGIS.
• Support training and mentorship to build analytical capacity within CHAI’s regional team, including data management best practices, configuration and use of online data collection and GIS/mapping tools.

 

Develop and maintain strong working relationships with the National Malaria Control Programs (NMCPs), other government and non-governmental partners and stakeholders working on malaria surveillance and mapping in Southern Africa:

• Review and provide feedback on relevant NMCP documents including but not limited to surveillance guidelines, M&E plans, lessons learned documents and operational manuals.

 

Any other tasks identified.

• Master’s degree in Public Health, Epidemiology, GIS or related field;
• 2+ years of working experience with increasing levels of responsibility and leadership;
• Statistical and geospatial analysis programming proficiency (R, SAS, STATA, ArcGIS and/or other relevant software);
• High levels of proficiency in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and internet applications;
• Exceptional written and oral communication skills;
• Knowledge of:
  • Malaria and/or other major global infectious disease problems;
  • Disease surveillance and strengthening information systems;
• Experience with:
  • Monitoring and evaluation of surveillance systems and/or public health programs;
  • Epidemiological and spatial analysis of disease data;
• Willingness to travel (30-50% of time)

Advantages:

• Experience working with:
  • Health Information System platforms (e.g. DHIS2)
  • Data collection tools (e.g. ODK and Survey CTO)
  • Data visualization applications (e.g. Tableau, Shiny);
• Experience working and communicating with government officials and multilateral organizations;
• Experience living or working in resource-limited settings.