MERL Associate

Job Overview

As MERL Associate you assist in the design, evaluation, and adaptation of specific health interventions within our organisation. At the beginning of a project, the MERL Associate is responsible (with guidance from the MERL team) for identifying barriers to healthy behaviours, appropriate interventions and selecting relevant impact assessment measures. At the end of a project, the MERL Associate is responsible for interpreting user engagement and programme impact using statistical methods and report writing. As Reach explores new health domains and intervention strategies, there is space for collaboration on innovative platform design.

To be a successful MERL Associate, you should have a strong research background including qualitative and quantitative methods experience, critical thinking, and communication skills. You should be able to work with the statistical software package Stata to analyze large datasets for impact measurement. You should be flexible and able to work independently or in a team.

Responsibilities and Duties

• Conducting literature reviews detailing barriers to health for disadvantaged citizens in multiple African countries within specific health domains and their intersections. 
• Identifying evidence-based interventions addressing barriers from public health, behavioural science, development economics, and other research fields.
• Identifying innovative and evidence-based instruments for measuring behavioural, clinical, and psychological outcomes including the identification and operationalization of health impact indicators within the Reach MERL framework.
• Design surveys and other digital data-gathering methods to assist programme evaluation methods.
• Design and implement qualitative data collection activities to support programme evaluation and learning, and when necessary, manage qualitative data collection firms for larger scale efforts.
• Using quantitative statistical programmes and methods to clean and interpret data generated within Reach’s mobile platform or other interventions.
• Generating reports detailing demographics, behaviours and outcomes of various interventions. 
• Using data analysis and interpretations to support the decision-making efforts of the organisation.
• Organising and analysing data, creating charts and graphs, and presenting your findings to the leadership team.
• Working with the user experience team to identify clinical outcome measures as well as determine behavioral impact measures within a particular health domain.
• Design and determine the relevant assessments to be applied in the behavioural tracking within user flows.
• Lead the research component on behavioural barriers and feasibly back up the relevant areas of need identified.

Qualifications

• An honours degree in economics, public health, biology, epidemiology, statistics, psychology, computer science, or other quantitative social science field.

Skills and Experience Required

• Strong statistical, analytic, quantitative and qualitative data interpretation skills
• Moderate to strong exposure to econometric, impact evaluation or other causal inference techniques
• The ability to manipulate large, complex data sets into manageable, understandable reports
• Experience and confidence in conducting literature reviews spanning a range of research fields
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and team-working skills
• Strong skills in Stata (preferred), R, SPSS, or Python
• Attention to detail and organisational skills
• Interest in data visualisation