E T Consultant -Technical Lead FASTR

E T Consultant -Technical Lead FASTR

Job #:

req32137

Organization:

World Bank

Sector:

Economics

Grade:

EC3

Term Duration:
1 year 0 months

Recruitment Type:

Local Recruitment

Location:

Washington, DC,United States

Required Language(s):

English

Preferred Language(s):

Closing Date:

3/19/2025 (MM/DD/YYYY) at 11:59pm UTC

Description

Do you want to build a career that is truly worthwhile? Working at the World Bank Group provides a unique opportunity for you to help our clients solve their greatest development challenges. The World Bank Group is one of the largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries; a unique global partnership of five institutions dedicated to ending extreme poverty, increasing shared prosperity and promoting sustainable development. With 189 member countries and more than 120 offices worldwide, we work with public and private sector partners, investing in groundbreaking projects and using data, research, and technology to develop solutions to the most urgent global challenges. For more information, visit www.worldbank.org

The Development Economics (DEC) Vice Presidency
DEC is the primary hub of the World Bank's knowledge system. Through its various functions ? research, global analysis and development data ? it serves member countries and the Bank in generating knowledge and absorbing, disseminating, and utilizing it for economic development and poverty reduction around the world. DEC seeks to increase understanding of development policies and programs by providing intellectual leadership and analytical services to the Bank and the development community. DEC's structure reflects these objectives, comprising the Development Research Group, Development Data Group, Global Indicators Group, Development Impact Evaluation Group, and a Development Policy unit.

The Development Research Group
The Development Research Group (DECRG) and the Global Financing Facility (Health, Nutrition and Population Global Practice) Located within the Development Economics Vice Presidency, the Development Research Group (DECRG) is the World Bank's principal research department. With its cross-cutting expertise on a broad range of topics and countries, the department is one of the most influential centers of development research in the world. Within DECRG, the Poverty, Inequality and Human Development team (DECPH) conducts research across a wide range of topics that broadly covers issues related to improving the wellbeing of people, particularly less well-off individuals, with the aim of enhancing sustainable, upward economic and social mobility. Some examples of topics covered by this team include early childhood development, education/skills, health, poverty, inequality, labor, and aging.

The program includes methodological research on survey design and methods, and adaptive sampling techniques; as well as the use of improved data and existing data sources to better inform and assess the effectiveness of specific policies in enhancing human development and reducing poverty and inequality. The Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents (GFF) is a multi-stakeholder global partnership housed at the World Bank that is committed to ensuring all women, children and adolescents can survive and thrive. Launched in July 2015, the GFF supports 36 low and lower-middle income countries with catalytic financing and technical assistance to develop and implement prioritized national health plans to scale up access to affordable, quality care for women, children, and adolescents. The GFF also works with countries to maximize the use of domestic financing and external support for better, more sustainable health results. The GFF is squarely focused on prioritizing and scaling up evidence-driven investments to improve reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health and nutrition through targeted strengthening of primary health care systems ? to save lives and as a critical first step toward accelerating progress on Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Project Background
Frequent Assessment and Systems Tools for Resilience (FASTR) Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) and improving the health of women, children and adolescents requires resilient health systems that utilize timely country-generated data to monitor health reforms, respond to disruptions in health service utilization, and inform how the health system adapts to changing needs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Development Economics Research Group and the Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents (GFF)supported Ministries of Health in 22 low- and middle-income countries to quantify the extent of disruptions to essential health services (EHS) with rapid-cycle monitoring approaches. This support demonstrated that reductions in essential health services were a major contributor to the pandemic's overall impact on mortality and set back the global effort to reduce child and maternal deaths in most countries.

A range of events beyond COVID-19 contributed to service disruptions, including political instability, prolonged and acute insecurity, health worker strikes, supply chain shortages, economic shortages, and infectious disease outbreaks. Though many countries are no longer in the acute phase of the pandemic, these events continue to threaten service delivery and progress towards UHC. Through FASTR, DECPH and the GFF provide support to country-led efforts to build infrastructure for rapid-cycle service delivery data collection, analysis, and interpretation to inform actions to strengthen resilient health systems with a four-pillar approach. FASTR is a team that cuts across multiple units, with close collaboration between the DEC, GFF, the HNP Global Engagement team, and the regions.

DECPH leads on the research agenda associated with FASTR, by addressing key knowledge and evidentiary gaps. In all partner countries, the GFF offers technical assistance to assess acute constraints in EHS service delivery through a package of rapid-cycle analytics. In partner countries with demand for additional services, a broader package of activities is available to strengthen the capacity and policy pathways required for evidence-based policy to improve the delivery of essential health services. These activities provide demand-driven support to GFF partner countries to strengthen the resilience of health systems and ultimately reduce morbidity and mortality for women, children, and adolescents. This position will be mapped to DECPH and co-supervised by the DECPH Practice Manager and the GFF Results & Learning workstream lead.

Responsibilities
Duties will include, but not be limited to, the following:

? Lead and manage in-depth analysis of large public health datasets to identify trends, patterns, and correlations contributing to informed decision-making. This includes complex analyses such as health facility survey validation and multi-country research studies.
? Advance and develop the FASTR research agenda, including leading generation of original research studies.
? Strengthen documentation of how data and evidence generated through FASTR have contributed to decision-making.
? Develop a multi-year strategic plan and roll-out strategy for the forthcoming FASTR health facility survey analysis user interface tool designed for country-led survey data analysis.
? Advise on survey operational considerations in partnership with FASTR?s survey coordinator, including study protocols, ethical considerations, data collection plans, and quality assurance measures. Provide active technical leadership in supporting health facility survey implementation as requested, including onboarding, training, sensitizing of enumerators, field-testing of questionnaires, support the development and between-round revision of questionnaires and their associated CAPI data collection tool, and help maintain a central repository of survey results, master data dictionary, and adaptation tracking.
? Serve as a lead trainer on FASTR?s survey approaches for country-level institutionalization, developing survey design, and survey analysis.
? Support the conceptualization of how to triangulate and interpret health facility data with demand-side data sources.
? Cultivate strategic partnerships with global health agencies, development partners, and country governments.
? Collaborate closely with GFF country operations, WB task teams, DECPH, other relevant WB units, survey firms, MOH officials and other partners to define research questions, design studies, and extract meaningful insights from diverse healthcare datasets.
? Supervise the day-to-day analytical work of research assistants, providing effective quality assurance, technical supervision, and mentorship.
? Provide other relevant work supporting the FASTR activities, including cross-support to analysis of FASTR?s household and client-exit surveys and routine health systems information analyses.

Selection Criteria

? Master?s degree in public health, Data Science, Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Economics, or a related field with a minimum of 8 years of relevant experience. PhD preferred.
? Documented experience managing health facility surveys in LMICs is a requirement; experience with client, Community Health Worker, and population-based surveys is an asset; experience with highly applied research approaches and/or translating research-to-action is strongly preferred.
? Advanced analytical expertise including methods for analyzing both cross sectional and longitudinal health survey data sets.
? Advanced proficiency in programming languages such as Stata (required), Python, and/or R (preferred) for data manipulation and analysis is required. Experience with visualization software such as Tableau is an asset.
? Content knowledge and/or demonstrated professional experience working on policies, programs, or research activities focused on health systems, RMNCAH-N and primary health care in low- and middle-income countries is preferred.
? Demonstrated ability to manage multi-activity, multi-country projects or research studies across a diverse team.
? Excellent communication skills, with the ability to present technical findings to non-technical stakeholders effectively.
? French language skills are strongly preferred.
? Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work collaboratively in interdisciplinary teams to address public health challenges.

World Bank Group Core Competencies

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Note: The selected candidate will be offered a one-year appointment, renewable at the discretion of the World Bank Group, and subject to a lifetime maximum ET appointment of three years. If an ET appointment ends before a full year, it is considered as a full year toward the lifetime maximum. Former and current ET staff who have completed all or any portion of their third-year ET appointment are not eligible for future ET appointments.

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