Epidemiologist Research Associate, Clinton Health Access Initiative

Overview

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. 

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 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. In addition, CHAI is also supporting national malaria programs to identify the bottlenecks and potential solutions in surveillance systems, specifically to improve the collection, reporting, analysis and use of data for programmatic decision-making. Benin and Burkina Faso are the newest additions to CHAI’s portfolio in the region, where initial efforts will be focused on conducting country-specific surveillance landscaping assessments. Similar assessments are expected to be conducted in two additional countries and therefore a total of four countries across Sub-Saharan Africa.

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 Africa, with an initial focus on Benin and Burkina Faso. The project will initially focus on the design and implementation of a landscaping assessment to identify of critical technical, operational and financial bottlenecks in surveillance (data collection, reporting, analysis and feedback) at all levels of the health system (health facility up to national) in 2-4 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, and provide prioritized recommendations to address these gaps.
• Specific activities will include: desktop review of relevant policy, scientific and grey literature, qualitative assessments of surveillance system performance through interviews with key stakeholders at national and local level, as well as other relevant partners, designing and implementing health facility survey to quantify the performance of surveillance system, and epidemiological analysis of malaria surveillance, case management, entomological and intervention data and key malaria indicators.
• The individual will report to the Technical advisor for East, Central, West Africa and 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 Research Associate will need to collaborate with government programs, academics and public health agencies to ensure CHAI’s work is complementary and not duplicative other ongoing efforts.

Responsibilities

• Implement analytical projects related to malaria epidemiology, intervention and surveillance, as required;
  Responsible for country-level implementations of surveillance assessment protocols, and lead activities that relate to that – partner engagement, submission of IRBs, selection of data firms, training of data collection teams, monitoring data collection, data management and analysis, organization of in-country meetings
• Organize and merge available data, assessing its quality and suitability for analysis, data management and conduct statistical analyses
• Appropriately and concisely visualize data in the form of charts and maps;
• Provide technical supervision, training and ad-hoc programmatic support to staff members involved in epidemiological activities such monitoring and evaluation of existing activities, study implementation and all data cleaning, management and analysis tasks;
• Develop and maintain strong working relationships with key stakeholders across government, non-governmental organizations, and academic institutions, with support from program managers;
• Synthesize results, translate them to national and sub-national government partners to support evidence-based decision making, and disseminate findings through high-quality presentations, reports, and publications internally and externally at international venues;
• Any other tasks identified.

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