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April 15, 2007
Senior Impact Analyst, Global Development: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Location: Seattle, Washington, USA
Position Description
Summary: The foundation recently established a central team to focus on impact planning, assessment, and improvement at the portfolio and program level. This team works with senior management and program staff in assessing the impact of the program strategies, theories of action and change and the identification of core questions that cut across program areas. The team will work to ensure that we critically assess the impact of our strategies and then improve them. The team also helps the programs develop reliable information about program effects and causal linkages that are useful in the foundation’s advocacy efforts.
The team is responsible for developing standards and processes for assessing program results and learning from experience, and also for providing internal consulting to help ensure that the Foundation efficiently produces real and lasting results through its grant-making. The team’s customers are the senior management of the foundation and its three grant-making programs. Members of the team work closely with program officers during strategy development and during program reviews to ensure that appropriate measurement and evaluation strategies and methods are developed and applied and the results reported in a manner that effectively supports learning and adaptation by the foundation and other relevant actors.
While reporting to the Foundation’s Director of Impact Planning and Improvement, the Senior Global Development Impact Analyst will be deployed to and serve as an integral part of the Global Development program team. (Along with the Global Health and United States Programs, Global Development is one of the three programmatic divisions of the Foundation and is responsible for about 25% of our grant making.) This person will be the first point of recourse for all Global Development program staff to secure expert advice in developing impact measurement and evaluation approaches as appropriate for program initiatives as well as individual grants, and for help in interpreting results. In providing this advice this person will draw on her or his own experience and expertise as well as the broader IPI team.
Responsibilities:
- Provides internal consultancy to program staff on impact measurement and leverages collective knowledge around impact assessment and “what works” in grant making and grant management; helps share learning across the foundation and outside.
- Works with Global Development program staff to ensure that the Foundation measures results as appropriate to assess the impact of grants or a portfolio of grants, especially as a means to gauge the effectiveness of our theories of system change that guide program strategy. Connects Global Development Staff with appropriate external resources for evaluation and impact measurement.
- Maintains contact with the global community of experts and specialists concerned with understanding the impact of development interventions and establishing improved capacities for providing reliable economic baseline and impact data, and helps provide empirical grounding as the Foundation develops its interventions and tracks their impact.
- Mentors more junior members of the foundation staff who have a professional focus on measurement and evaluation.
Qualifications:
- Minimum 8 years of consulting, evaluation, or research and writing experience in analytic contexts demonstrating abilities relevant to foundation program evaluation and impact assessment.
- Demonstrated ability to translate technical concepts into common sense language.
- Advanced degree in a field requiring significant fluency in economic and statistical methods and causal inference, or equivalent experience.
- Understanding of real-world complex systems and analytic methods for assessing causal responsibility in these systems
- Experience with grant making and the evaluation of clusters of grants in the development context is desired but not essential.
- Demonstrated success in roles requiring execution of multiple tasks while responding to multiple priorities in a highly dynamic environment.
- Demonstrated ability to work with efficiency, flexibility and good humor, particularly as part of a team effort.
- Excellent written and oral communication skills
- Ability to exercise tact and diplomacy in organizational settings
- A deep commitment to the overall mission of the foundation, its programs, and an approach consistent with the foundation’s guiding principles.
- Substantive and institutional knowledge relating to Global Development
- Ability and willingness to travel internationally up to 25%
Reports to: Director, Impact Planning and Improvement
To apply for this position, please visit http://www.gatesfoundation.org/AboutUs/WorkingWithUs/Jobs and submit your resume online.
Due to the volume of inquiries and applications we receive on a regular basis, the online application is the best and only way to ensure that your submissions are reviewed in a timely manner.
We are an equal opportunity employer dedicated and focused on diversity.
The statements in this description represent typical elements, criteria and general work performed. They are not intended to be construed as an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties and skills for this job.
