About Evidence ActionAt Evidence Action, we deliver data-driven interventions that transform lives at an unprecedented scale. We identify neglected global health issues and deploy proven solutions, forging healthier futures for generations.Our model operationalizes leading academic research, including from Nobel-winning economists. We measure progress and outcomes at every stage to ensure we are making a real impact for people living in poverty and suffering from preventable or treatable health issues. Operating across 11 countries, our team of 900+ has reached over 500 million people, working closely with governments to scale these interventions.Deworm the World has delivered over 2 billion treatments, significantly reducing worm prevalence and generating more than $23 billion in lifetime productivity gains.Safe Water Now has saved the lives of over 15,000 children.Our Accelerator explores untapped opportunities in global health, testing low-cost interventions with the greatest potential to save and improve lives.At Evidence Action, your colleagues are your greatest asset. You will partner with high-caliber colleagues in an environment blending innovation, autonomy, and teamwork. Our team excels in disruptive thinking and believes in rolling up our sleeves to get things done. If you are looking to work flexibly and with purpose, join a team that delivers measurable change for millions.The RoleEvidence 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. Evidence and cost-effectiveness are central to Evidence Action’s comparative advantage; they are what makes us credible and distinctive to government partners and donors alike, and this role will shape how that advantage evolves as we grow.As the Executive Vice President (EVP), Evidence, you will own the strategic growth and transformation of our Monitoring, Learning, and Evaluation teams, our Cost-Effectiveness arm, and our epidemiology capability at a pivotal organizational moment. 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. Our recent Dispensers for Safe Water update reflects the transparent, evidence-first culture this role will help lead.This is a role with two connected mandates under one leader. You will lead the generation and use of evidence throughout the program lifecycle in close collaboration with programs, while maintaining an independence in your assessment of evidence, surfacing uncomfortable findings when necessary. Bringing these together in one senior role reporting directly to the CEO gives evidence a genuine, empowered voice in our decision-making.In this role, you will sit on Evidence Action’s Global Leadership Team (GLT), which sets organizational strategy and direction. This is a pivotal opportunity for an executive who can navigate complexity, inspire high-performing teams, and translate evidence into action, driving measurable improvements in millions of lives for years to come.How You Will Make an ImpactLead a holistic evidence function 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, rather than separate streams of analysis.In collaboration with GLT and program leads, set a cross-program evidence strategy, defining the questions Evidence Action is answering across its portfolio, matching the right methodological approaches and connecting evidence to both delivery and organizational learning.Serve as a technical thought partner to teams across Evidence Action, making evidence more readily visible and actionable across the organization, evolving our cost-effectiveness tooling to enhance visibility into what drives cost-effectiveness and shortening the feedback loop between realized costs and impact and our projected impact. Champion evidence across a program’s lifecycle, ensuring we're designing the right evidence generation to feed lessons into scaling decisions and evolving our cost-effectiveness tools so organizational leaders understand what drives cost-effectiveness and we can actualize modeled impact.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.Own independent quality assuranceUnderstand 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, holding a strong voice in those decisions while partnering with program and regional leaders who bring essential local context.Strengthen technical capability and relieve program teamsBuild internal technical management capacity that benefit our programsLead a multi-disciplinary function through consolidation and change, building trust across MLE, cost-effectiveness, and epidemiology teams and bringing our people along through a significant transition.Identify where AI and modern data tools can strengthen evidence generation and decision-making at scale.Represent Evidence Action externallyServe as a senior organizational voice on evidence, engaging donors, the board, and technical partners on our evidence philosophy, methodological choices, and standing evaluation arrangements.Champion a transparent culture that shares learning; including learning from what does not work, both inside the organization and with the relevant external stakeholders.Who You AreWe are looking for a leader with rigorous technical training who has spent much of their career as a user and steward of evidence in real implementation settings, not primarily as an academic researcher.EssentialThe courage to act on evidence. You are willing to surface uncomfortable findings to senior leadership and to recommend a change of course when the evidence calls for it.Technical leadership and management at scale. You have led similar technical teams, upholding quality assurance, in low- and middle-income country contexts with a grounding in operational rigor.Program-implementation grounding. You 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. You can conceptualize change management and bring people along, delegate across a large scope, and build trust across teams and cultures.What this role is notThis is not an audit or compliance role. This role is intended to build the systems and structures that reinforce the appropriate generation and application of evidence as programs evolve, so evidence becomes more than just a box we check.This is not a publication engine. External research is not the primary goal of this work.This is not a remote or distant role. Field presence and proximity to implementation are design requirements.LocationThis role location is flexible, though we have a preference for a country where Evidence Action has an office, with India, Kenya, and Nigeria of particular interest. This role will require approximately 20% travel nationally and internationally as needed.BenefitsEvidence Action provides a comprehensive benefits package for employees worldwide. *Benefits may differ based on country-specific regulationsBenefits include:Comprehensive health insurancePension/ Retirement savings optionsPaid leaveAvenues for engagement and recognition.Compensation is competitive and commensurate with the individual’s credentials, experience, and internal pay scale.Evidence Action is an Equal Opportunity Employer with a commitment to representation and inclusion. All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply.
About Evidence Action
At Evidence Action, we deliver data-driven interventions that transform lives at an unprecedented scale. We identify neglected global health issues and deploy proven solutions, forging healthier futures for generations.
Our model operationalizes leading academic research, including from Nobel-winning economists. We measure progress and outcomes at every stage to ensure we are making a real impact for people living in poverty and suffering from preventable or treatable health issues. Operating across 11 countries, our team of 900+ has reached over 500 million people, working closely with governments to scale these interventions.
- Deworm the World has delivered over 2 billion treatments, significantly reducing worm prevalence and generating more than $23 billion in lifetime productivity gains.
- Safe Water Now has saved the lives of over 15,000 children.
- Our Accelerator explores untapped opportunities in global health, testing low-cost interventions with the greatest potential to save and improve lives.
At Evidence Action, your colleagues are your greatest asset. You will partner with high-caliber colleagues in an environment blending innovation, autonomy, and teamwork. Our team excels in disruptive thinking and believes in rolling up our sleeves to get things done. If you are looking to work flexibly and with purpose, join a team that delivers measurable change for millions.
The Role
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. Evidence and cost-effectiveness are central to Evidence Action’s comparative advantage; they are what makes us credible and distinctive to government partners and donors alike, and this role will shape how that advantage evolves as we grow.
As the Executive Vice President (EVP), Evidence, you will own the strategic growth and transformation of our Monitoring, Learning, and Evaluation teams, our Cost-Effectiveness arm, and our epidemiology capability at a pivotal organizational moment. 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. Our recent Dispensers for Safe Water update reflects the transparent, evidence-first culture this role will help lead.
This is a role with two connected mandates under one leader. You will lead the generation and use of evidence throughout the program lifecycle in close collaboration with programs, while maintaining an independence in your assessment of evidence, surfacing uncomfortable findings when necessary. Bringing these together in one senior role reporting directly to the CEO gives evidence a genuine, empowered voice in our decision-making.
In this role, you will sit on Evidence Action’s Global Leadership Team (GLT), which sets organizational strategy and direction. This is a pivotal opportunity for an executive who can navigate complexity, inspire high-performing teams, and translate evidence into action, driving measurable improvements in millions of lives for years to come.
How You Will Make an Impact
Lead a holistic evidence function
- 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, rather than separate streams of analysis.
- In collaboration with GLT and program leads, set a cross-program evidence strategy, defining the questions Evidence Action is answering across its portfolio, matching the right methodological approaches and connecting evidence to both delivery and organizational learning.
- Serve as a technical thought partner to teams across Evidence Action, making evidence more readily visible and actionable across the organization, evolving our cost-effectiveness tooling to enhance visibility into what drives cost-effectiveness and shortening the feedback loop between realized costs and impact and our projected impact.
- Champion evidence across a program’s lifecycle, ensuring we're designing the right evidence generation to feed lessons into scaling decisions and evolving our cost-effectiveness tools so organizational leaders understand what drives cost-effectiveness and we can actualize modeled impact.
- 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.
Own independent quality assurance
- 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, holding a strong voice in those decisions while partnering with program and regional leaders who bring essential local context.
Strengthen technical capability and relieve program teams
- 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 and bringing our people along through a significant transition.
- Identify where AI and modern data tools can strengthen evidence generation and decision-making at scale.
Represent Evidence Action externally
- Serve as a senior organizational voice on evidence, engaging donors, the board, and technical partners on our evidence philosophy, methodological choices, and standing evaluation arrangements.
- Champion a transparent culture that shares learning; including learning from what does not work, both inside the organization and with the relevant external stakeholders.
Who You Are
We are looking for a leader with rigorous technical training who has spent much of their career as a user and steward of evidence in real implementation settings, not primarily as an academic researcher.
Essential
- The courage to act on evidence. You are willing to surface uncomfortable findings to senior leadership and to recommend a change of course when the evidence calls for it.
- Technical leadership and management at scale. You have led similar technical teams, upholding quality assurance, in low- and middle-income country contexts with a grounding in operational rigor.
- Program-implementation grounding. You 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. You can conceptualize change management and bring people along, delegate across a large scope, and build trust across teams and cultures.
What this role is not
- This is not an audit or compliance role. This role is intended to build the systems and structures that reinforce the appropriate generation and application of evidence as programs evolve, so evidence becomes more than just a box we check.
- This is not a publication engine. External research is not the primary goal of this work.
- This is not a remote or distant role. Field presence and proximity to implementation are design requirements.
Location
This role location is flexible, though we have a preference for a country where Evidence Action has an office, with India, Kenya, and Nigeria of particular interest.
This role will require approximately 20% travel nationally and internationally as needed.
Benefits
Evidence Action provides a comprehensive benefits package for employees worldwide.
*Benefits may differ based on country-specific regulations
Benefits include:
Comprehensive health insurance
Pension/ Retirement savings options
Paid leave
Avenues for engagement and recognition.
Compensation is competitive and commensurate with the individual’s credentials, experience, and internal pay scale.
Evidence Action is an Equal Opportunity Employer with a commitment to representation and inclusion. All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply.
We do development differently.Evidence Action is a global nonprofit organization with an approach distinctive in international development – we exclusively scale interventions that are backed by strong evidence and can be delivered with exceptional cost-effectiveness. We take a data-driven approach to identifying and scaling interventions which deliver outsized impact for the hundreds of millions of impoverished individuals who are our clients. We deploy deep expertise in building for scale, coupled with a focus on rigorous measurement and continuous program improvement, to ensure these solutions measurably improve the lives of millions. We deliver tremendous impact.Our programs – in health, nutrition, and safe water – have grown since our founding in 2013 to reach over 280 million people annually. Our Deworm the World Initiative has helped governments across Asia and Africa deliver over 1.3 billion childhood deworming treatments – which have been shown to increase long-term income by 13%. This places deworming among the most cost-effective income generation programs in the world, as ranked by charity evaluators such as GiveWell and The Life You Can Save. Our Dispensers for Safe Water program provides sustained safe water access to over 4 million people in rural Kenya, Uganda, and Malawi. Our last-mile delivery network services communities through a free-to-use, human-centric design that increases usage over 5 times that of traditional water treatment options, preventing childhood illness and deaths caused by unsafe water. Dispensers for Safe Water has been recognized by Charity Navigator for its high cost-effectiveness, by Expo2020 as one of only 25 Global Best Practice Programmes, and a chlorine dispenser now resides in the Nobel Museum, selected by 2019 Nobel laureate Michael Kremer – whose work was integral to the program’s development. We drive innovation.Evidence Action’s Accelerator builds the next generation of exceptional programs, taking an approach most similar to a venture capital model. We thoughtfully advance promising new programs through a rigorous, 6 stage process – from desk research to testing at large scale. We are ruthless in exiting programs which do not meet our criteria on scalability, evidence of impact, and cost-effectiveness, ensuring that the programs that do advance deliver outsized impact for millions of people. We are global.Over 400 individuals work on our programs across eight countries – Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Pakistan, Uganda, India, and the United States, including both Evidence Action staff and close partners. We are united by a tremendous passion for our mission and the impact that together we create. We are strong because of our diversity of experience, geography, and background – with over 90% of our people in the countries where our impact is focused. This spirit, and our culture, are guided by a set of core values that underpin our work. These values embody our focus on evidence, urgency, iteration, and incessance in our search for solutions. We have big ambitions.Our goal is to double our impact by 2024, to fulfill our vision of a world where hundreds of millions of people in the poorest places have better opportunities and their lives are measurably improved. We believe in bold and urgent action – because poverty doesn’t wait, and neither should we. We need great people.Our success to date is due to the collective work of our amazing staff. To achieve our ambitious goals, we need to grow our team. We are looking for people who share our passion for following the evidence, seeking cost-effective ways of working, and operating at scale. We seek individuals who take an entrepreneurial approach, enjoy tackling hard problems, and iterate to achieve the best solutions – and know that people with these skills come from many professional backgrounds. If our vision and approach excite you as much as it does us, we invite you to join us.
We do development differently.
Evidence Action is a global nonprofit organization with an approach distinctive in international development – we exclusively scale interventions that are backed by strong evidence and can be delivered with exceptional cost-effectiveness. We take a data-driven approach to identifying and scaling interventions which deliver outsized impact for the hundreds of millions of impoverished individuals who are our clients. We deploy deep expertise in building for scale, coupled with a focus on rigorous measurement and continuous program improvement, to ensure these solutions measurably improve the lives of millions.
We deliver tremendous impact.
Our programs – in health, nutrition, and safe water – have grown since our founding in 2013 to reach over 280 million people annually. Our Deworm the World Initiative has helped governments across Asia and Africa deliver over 1.3 billion childhood deworming treatments – which have been shown to increase long-term income by 13%. This places deworming among the most cost-effective income generation programs in the world, as ranked by charity evaluators such as GiveWell and The Life You Can Save. Our Dispensers for Safe Water program provides sustained safe water access to over 4 million people in rural Kenya, Uganda, and Malawi. Our last-mile delivery network services communities through a free-to-use, human-centric design that increases usage over 5 times that of traditional water treatment options, preventing childhood illness and deaths caused by unsafe water. Dispensers for Safe Water has been recognized by Charity Navigator for its high cost-effectiveness, by Expo2020 as one of only 25 Global Best Practice Programmes, and a chlorine dispenser now resides in the Nobel Museum, selected by 2019 Nobel laureate Michael Kremer – whose work was integral to the program’s development.
We drive innovation.
Evidence Action’s Accelerator builds the next generation of exceptional programs, taking an approach most similar to a venture capital model. We thoughtfully advance promising new programs through a rigorous, 6 stage process – from desk research to testing at large scale. We are ruthless in exiting programs which do not meet our criteria on scalability, evidence of impact, and cost-effectiveness, ensuring that the programs that do advance deliver outsized impact for millions of people.
We are global.
Over 400 individuals work on our programs across eight countries – Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Pakistan, Uganda, India, and the United States, including both Evidence Action staff and close partners. We are united by a tremendous passion for our mission and the impact that together we create. We are strong because of our diversity of experience, geography, and background – with over 90% of our people in the countries where our impact is focused. This spirit, and our culture, are guided by a set of core values that underpin our work. These values embody our focus on evidence, urgency, iteration, and incessance in our search for solutions.
We have big ambitions.
Our goal is to double our impact by 2024, to fulfill our vision of a world where hundreds of millions of people in the poorest places have better opportunities and their lives are measurably improved. We believe in bold and urgent action – because poverty doesn’t wait, and neither should we.
We need great people.
Our success to date is due to the collective work of our amazing staff. To achieve our ambitious goals, we need to grow our team. We are looking for people who share our passion for following the evidence, seeking cost-effective ways of working, and operating at scale. We seek individuals who take an entrepreneurial approach, enjoy tackling hard problems, and iterate to achieve the best solutions – and know that people with these skills come from many professional backgrounds.
If our vision and approach excite you as much as it does us, we invite you to join us.
