Executive Vice President, Evidence

Evidence Action was built on the belief that data should drive every decision, from how programs are designed and delivered to how resources are allocated and scaled. As the Executive Vice President (EVP) of Evidence, you will own the strategic growth and transformation of our Monitoring, Learning, and Evaluation teams, our Cost-Effectiveness arm, and our epidemiology capability. You will sit at the intersection of technical rigor, organizational leadership, and external credibility, holding overall accountability for the reliability of the evidence that guides how Evidence Action designs, delivers, and scales its programs.

• Oversee the technical and strategic aspects of our evidence teams, ensuring MLE, cost-effectiveness modeling, and epidemiology connect into a single, coherent picture that informs day-to-day program improvement and major decisions.
• In collaboration with GLT and program leads, set a cross-program evidence strategy, defining the questions Evidence Action is answering across its portfolio.
• Serve as a technical thought partner to teams across Evidence Action, making evidence more readily visible and actionable across the organization.
• Champion evidence across a program's lifecycle, ensuring we're designing the right evidence generation to feed lessons into scaling decisions.
• Institutionalize monitoring and learning (e.g., A/B testing) in programs so performance keeps improving well beyond launch.
• Sharpen where Evidence Action's own evidence generation is uniquely valuable versus where other partners are better placed.
• Understand how different evidence sources come together across programs to model our impact, and establish and enforce minimum standards for addressing weak evidence, uncertainty, and assumptions in that modeling.
• Design and implement the systems that let us review evidence consistently across our portfolio, including program stage gates and structured evidence and programmatic reviews at key decision points.
• Own data quality assurance so it is structurally independent from evidence generation, setting methodology standards, commissioning re-surveys and integrity checks, and surfacing issues early and transparently.
• Provide evidence-based recommendations that inform program scale-up, ongoing iteration, and wind-down decisions.
• Build internal technical management capacity that benefit our programs.
• Lead a multi-disciplinary function through consolidation and change, building trust across MLE, cost-effectiveness, and epidemiology teams.
• Identify where AI and modern data tools can strengthen evidence generation and decision-making at scale.
• Serve as a senior organizational voice on evidence, engaging donors, the board, and technical partners.
• Champion a transparent culture that shares learning, including learning from what does not work.

• Rigorous technical training and spent much of career as a user and steward of evidence in real implementation settings, not primarily as an academic researcher.
• The courage to act on evidence: willing to surface uncomfortable findings to senior leadership and recommend a change of course when the evidence calls for it.
• Technical leadership and management at scale: led similar technical teams, upholding quality assurance, in low- and middle-income country contexts with a grounding in operational rigor.
• Program-implementation grounding: pair academic research expertise with genuine operational experience, so you lead as an insider rather than from a distance.
• Technical credibility and range: a PhD or equivalent quantitative expertise that lets you judge the quality of evidence produced, hold teams to a high technical bar, draw on a range of analytical methods, and speak with authority alongside senior technical staff and external partners.
• Must have a background in cost-effectiveness or health economics, or the judgment to bring in the right experts.
• A strong leader of teams and change: can conceptualize change management and bring people along, delegate across a large scope, and build trust across teams and cultures.