Embedded Lab Manager

Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is a research and policy nonprofit that discovers and promotes effective solutions to global poverty problems. IPA brings together researchers and decision-makers to design, rigorously evaluate, and refine these solutions and their applications, ensuring that the evidence created is used to improve the lives of the world’s poor. In recent decades, trillions of dollars have been spent on programs designed to reduce global poverty, but clear evidence of which programs succeed is rare, and when evidence does exist, decision-makers often do not know about it. IPA exists to bring together leading researchers and these decision-makers to ensure that the evidence we create leads to a tangible impact on the world. Since its founding in 2002, IPA has worked with over 600 leading academics to conduct over 900 evaluations in 52 countries. This research has informed hundreds of successful programs that now impact millions of individuals worldwide.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Embedded Lab Manager

Location: Abuja

Job Summary

• The role leads a team of associates who support government partners in building their data systems and analytical capacity, and reports to the Associate Director, Policy, with dotted-line oversight from IPA’s Global Policy team and the Financial Inclusion Program (FIP).
• The Embedded Lab Manager will strengthen Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) systems and government data systems, foster institutional ownership of evidence-informed decision-making, and translate evidence into actionable insights through policy briefs and presentations.
• IPA Nigeria is seeking an Embedded Lab Manager to work closely with government institutions and other sector stakeholders to strengthen their capacity to generate, interpret, and use evidence to improve policies and programmes.

Responsibilities
Workplan management, reporting and stakeholder engagement (20%):

• Coordinate project activities alongside technical staff from the partner in a learning-by-doing approach, fostering active engagement throughout the process.
• Promote engagement to raise awareness of the lab and encourage collaborative efforts for collective impact.
• Cultivate relationships with key local top-level decision makers and ensure the project has sustained buy-in and input.
• Support other project management tasks, including progress tracking, financial oversight, and internal and donor reporting.
• Collaborate with the partner’s team to develop a shared work plan, ensuring alignment with project goals and effective implementation.

Generating relevant evidence (40%):

• Lead the co-creation of a policy-driven research agenda for the regulatory partners and guide the development of analytically rigorous research projects that generate actionable, data-driven insights.
• Develop and implement analytical and data-visualisation systems (dashboards) that translate raw data into clear, actionable insights for decision-makers, including automated reporting and interactive dashboards where appropriate.
• Facilitate engagement with local and international academics and technical experts to strengthen partners’ policy-driven research agendas, including advancing robust analytical methods and data use.
• Design and deliver hands-on workshops to build partners’ capacity in data engineering and analytics, including data pipelines, data merging and wrangling, statistical analysis, and dashboard or visual tool development, using platforms such as Power BI, Tableau, Stata, R, or Python.
• Manage research projects end-to-end: define research objectives and analytical frameworks, develop protocols, oversee data collection and management systems, supervise statistical analysis, and ensure data quality, reproducibility, and methodological rigor at all stages.
• Establish and institutionalise standard operating procedures, documentation, and reproducible analytical workflows so partner staff can independently maintain, update, and scale data systems over time.
• Identify and develop opportunities to leverage administrative and other large-scale datasets for policy-relevant research, including structuring data access, preparing datasets for analysis, and connecting local and international researchers to pursue these opportunities.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership in collecting, cleaning, structuring, integrating, and analysing large and complex administrative or survey datasets, applying reproducible workflows and best practices in data management.

Sharing evidence to inform program design and delivery (20%):

• Produce policy briefs on key policy questions.
• Develop user-friendly data dashboards, visualizations, or summaries for top-level decision-makers, ensuring that complex results are accessible and directly inform program design.
• In collaboration with researchers and in support of the country director, represent IPA locally in policy conversations and at events.
• Work together with the partner, the project team, sector team, and global policy and communications teams to lead and/or participate in strategic events for policy purposes, including but not limited to summits, conferences, workshops, technical working groups, and round tables.
• Share existing evidence to inform the partner’s program design and delivery.

Exploring program institutionalization (20%):

• Engage with the partner’s leadership to explore opportunities to institutionalize the lab for sustainability.

Qualifications

• Experience supervising staff and managing multiple concurrent engagements.
• Excellent communication skills, including clear, precise, non-technical written and presentation skills, with a strong written voice and effective spoken communication style.
• Proven ability to multitask and complete projects on tight deadlines with limited supervision.
• Strong quantitative skills, including the ability to understand academic research studies and analyze bodies of research.
• Experience with IPA and/or partner institutions. (preferred)
• 5+ years of relevant experience analyzing and communicating complex research results to various audiences, including at least 1 year working closely with government or large NGO partners in a low- or middle-income country (LMIC) context.
• Professional working proficiency in English (fluency).
• Master’s Degree in Economics, Development, International Relations, Public Administration, Public Policy, or a closely related field strongly preferred; additional experience will be accepted in place of a master’s degree. (preferred)
• Knowledge of the Nigerian policy-making process and government structures, or demonstrated experience building that knowledge quickly in a new country context.
• Strong ability to manage up and across, coordinating effectively with the Associate Director, Policy, the Global Policy team, and research staff.
• Experience as part of a government team, as a researcher, or with monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL). (preferred)
• Knowledge of and demonstrated experience in the use of rigorous evidence for international development policy.
• Experience in agriculture, education, financial inclusion, or social protection. (preferred).

How to Apply
Interested and qualified candidates should:
Click here to apply online