Research Associate, Malaria Surveillance and Analytics, Harare, Zimbabwe
Employment in Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI)
Organization: Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI)
Country: Zimbabwe
City: Harare
Overview
Founded in 2002 by President William J. Clinton, the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) is a global health organization committed to strengthening integrated health systems around the world and expanding access to care and treatment for HIV/AIDS, malaria and other illnesses. Based on the premise that business oriented strategy can facilitate solutions to global health challenges, CHAI acts as a catalyst to mobilize new resources and optimize the impact of these resources to save lives, via improved organization of commodity markets and more effective local management. By working in association with governments and other NGO partners, CHAI is focused on large scale impact and, to date, CHAI has secured lower pricing agreements for treatment options in more than 70 countries. In addition, CHAI’s teams are working side-by-side with over 30 governments to tackle many of the largest barriers to effective treatment and care.
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
Several countries in the Southern Africa region have committed to eliminate malaria by 2020. To reach this target, countries will need to rapidly detect and effectively treat infections, to identify and aggressively target areas where malaria transmission persists, and to coordinate efforts closely to ensure movements of people and parasites do not jeopardize success. Achievement of this goal across the region will bring the world one step closer to global malaria eradication. CHAI is supporting malaria programs in South Africa, Swaziland, Namibia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Botswana to strengthen surveillance systems, devise targeted and evidence-based plans, successfully implement these plans, scale-up interventions in high-risk and hard-to-reach populations, and to coordinate activities regionally.
CHAI is seeking a highly motivated individual with strong public health research experience and analytical skills. This individual will support surveillance, analytics, and mapping activities related to malaria elimination efforts. The Research Associate will focus primarily on supporting countries of Southern Africa where CHAI is working. As such, the individual will work with a number of individuals on CHAI’s Global and Regional Malaria Teams and will therefore need to possess strong communication and organizational skills. It is expected that the Research Associate will need to partner with other academics and public health agencies to ensure CHAI’s research is complementary and not duplicative.
Responsibilities
- Assisting to monitor and evaluate the performance of existing and new surveillance platforms;
- Supporting the implementation of new surveillance platforms for improved data collection, data management, analysis and data visualization;
- Organizing and merging available data, assessing its quality and suitability for analysis and conducting statistical analyses (regressions, time series and other relevant methods);
- Analyzing geographic and remote sensing data with GIS software, including descriptive and predictive mapping of malaria burden and intervention coverage;
- Translating results to national and sub-national government partners to support evidence-based decision making;
- Synthesizing results and communicating them internally and externally at international venues;
- Disseminating findings through high-quality presentations, reports, and publications; and
- Any other tasks identified.
Qualifications
- Master’s degree in Public Health, Epidemiology, GIS or related field strongly preferred; or Bachelor’s degree minimum with exceptional experience
- 2+ years of working experience with increasing levels of responsibility and leadership;
- High levels of proficiency in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and internet applications;
- Experience in carrying out statistical analyses using relevant software (e.g. R, STATA);
- Experience working with geospatial data (shapefiles, rasters etc.) in Google Earth, QGIS, ArcGIS and/or other relevant software;
- Knowledge of major global infectious disease problems;
- Ability to work independently in remote and unstructured settings and to adapt to new environments and challenges;
- Enthusiasm for applying research methods to solve global health problems; and
- Exceptional written and oral communication skills
Advantages
- Knowledge of malaria;
- Experience working with surveillance platforms (e.g. DHIS2), data collection tools (e.g. ODK) and/or data visualization applications (e.g. Tableau);
- Experience working and communicating with government officials and multilateral organizations;
- Experience living or working in resource-limited settings;
- Experience working with a decentralized team; and
- Willingness to travel (30-50% of time).