Monitoring, Evaluation, and Data Systems Team Lead at Taimaka

Application Deadline: Rolling, with a final closure no later than January 31st, 2025. Applications may close sooner if a suitable candidate is found.

Expected Hours: 40 hours/week (full time)

Location: Gombe, Nigeria

Compensation: Dependent on need and experience. For expatriate staff, Taimaka will also provide housing, fund visa costs, and reimburse twice per year international travel to/from Nigeria.

Reports To: Executive Director, CMAM Program Director

Supervises: M+E Supervisor, Data Entry Clerk(s), Field Data Collectors

Start Date: As soon as possible, ideally February 2025.

Summary

We’re looking for an enterprising late early career or mid career professional to lead Taimaka’s Monitoring, Evaluation, and Data Systems team. You’ll maintain our ODK-based digital case management application, design processes to prevent fraud, and ensure that actionable data and insights reach our key decision-makers. With Taimaka on track to treat 75,000 cases of severe acute malnutrition in U5 children in the next three years, your work will directly shape the growth of our life-saving program.

We want someone who’s comfortable setting priorities independently, solving problems from first principles, and bringing a scrappy, innovative mindset to a startup-style environment. You’ll need experience in data analysis (R or Python), SQL, and team management. Even if you don’t check all the other boxes laid out below, a talent for learning fast matters most. If you’re resourceful, ambitious, and eager to dedicate your career to helping others, we encourage you to apply.

About Taimaka

Taimaka is a highly cost-effective, Founder’s Pledge recommended nonprofit that delivers reimagined pediatric malnutrition treatment to save the lives of the world’s most vulnerable children. We implement a modified form of community management of acute malnutrition (CMAM) treatment targeting children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in Gombe State, Nigeria. We are currently dramatically expanding our treatment program to reach 15k patients with SAM in 2025, 25k patients in 2026, and 35k patients in 2027. You can read more about our work here.

About the Job

Taimaka’s enrollment and treatment process for children with acute malnutrition is entirely digitized. Staff using our mobile phone application are guided step-by-step through the treatment process for each case they see, with that data then uploaded to our database to create a complete record of every touchpoint a child has with one of our providers. This, in theory, provides us with a fantastic amount of data to use to inform program design and execution. However, sometimes, we often find ourselves with too much data and not enough staff capacity to use it well.

The Monitoring, Evaluation, and Data Systems team lead role is designed to do three things:

1. Improve and maintain our digital treatment application (e.g., by updating protocols for care guidance given to staff). Your responsibilities here are distinctly ‘low-code’ (though still technical): more complicated tasks requiring detailed programming knowledge will be done in collaboration with the Executive Director or volunteer programmers.
2. Co-design and independently implement a strategy to effectively and efficiently utilize our data program decisions, by conducting data analysis and creating systems to get data into the hands of senior staff and field managers. This will require good knowledge of a statistical computing language (like R of Python Pandas), SQL, and dashboarding software (like Metabase).
3. Oversee our other Monitoring and Evaluation team members to ensure they are effectively contributing to these two core efforts.

Our current Monitoring and Evaluation team consists of ~3 FTEs:

1. An M+E Supervisor who monitors form submissions and makes corrections when needed, provides data on a by-request basis to program management staff, and who runs tri-annual field patient screening efforts with temporary staff contracted for ~1 week per screening.
2. A Data Entry Clerk who manually enters some paper forms filled by staff not equipped with smartphones (e.g., community mobilizers conducting at-home follow-up visits for patients).
3. A few part-time Field Data Collectors who conduct backchecking visits of admitted patients to verify their anthropometrics.

We expect that this team will need to expand by another few staff members as our program grows, meaning the team lead will need to carry out some recruitment and hiring as well.

We view this role as fitting into the later half of someone’s early career. Our priority is finding candidates who can work entrepreneurially – identifying key problems, work independently, and self-start – and think for themselves. We’re looking for scrappy innovators, so if you think you fit that, please apply even if you have to do some learning on the job.

Specific Responsibilities

Update and Maintain Digital Case Management Software – 20% of your time

• Implement simple updates to the Open Data Kit (ODK) forms Taimaka staff use to enroll patients and track their progress through the program (e.g., add a new biographical data collection question to the admission form)
• Execute more complex additions, like adding a warning to facility staff if a child has already been seen that week and is coming in for a second time (this requires integrating data from database queries into ODK attachments to provide real-time data back to the form)
• Make changes to these core ODK forms to ensure they remain in line with treatment protocols (e.g., changing recommended drug dosages in the section of the form that provides treatment guidance, based on changes in treatment protocols provided to you)
• Develop new ODK forms to meet program needs, such as digital attendance verification, supervision checklists, mapping new catchment areas, and replacing paper-based forms with digital versions.

Data Quality Assurance – 10% of your time

• Design and implement systems for your staff to routinely check data issues (like duplicate patient IDs, duplicate form submissions, etc.). Monitor your staff’s performance in carrying out these checks.
• Take initiative to improve these quality checks without external guidance. Brainstorm and refine over time what data needs to be checked to prevent problems.

Fraud Detection and Prevention – 20% of your time

• Conduct ongoing risk assessments for ways fraud could be committed by Taimaka staff or patient caregivers that would divert resources away from treatment. Prioritize the most impactful risks.
• Design and implement data-driven fraud prevention and detection measures – like randomized home visit checks, biometric verification, or other novel solutions – to prevent these risks. Refine these checks over time with minimal external guidance.
  • Implementation may include hiring and onboarding new members of the M+E team.
• Integrate fraud detection mechanisms into ODK forms, database systems, and M+E dashboards. For more complex prevention mechanisms requiring more in-depth coding abilities (like biometrics), project manage volunteer software developers.

Creating Systems to Provide Data to Program Staff – 10% of your time

• Identify key metrics program personnel need to make decisions and track program quality, through a combination of independent thought and work with the program team.
  • Some examples would be things like: facility-by-facility reports of reasons for non-recovery of patients, staff-level caseload reports to monitor distribution of workload, or automatically updating dashboards of stock levels at different facilities.
• Create dashboards or other methods (or delegate the creation of these) to share these metrics on an ongoing basis with program staff.
• Continuously refine these systems to tune them to make sure the right data is getting to program staff in a way that is helpful to them.

Gathering and Analyzing Data for Key Program Decisions – 20% of your time

• In response to requests from Taimaka’s senior executive team, plan and undertake larger data collection and analysis projects to inform key decisions and inflection points for the program.
• For instance: plan and execute a data collection effort to gather needed information to prioritize where to open new treatment facilities; conduct a detailed investigation of submitted data at one facility over a six month period to identify possible cases of data fabrication.
• For data collection efforts, expect to delegate a lot of the data collection efforts (once you plan it) to your junior staff. For more complex data analysis, expect to undertake this yourself. These tasks will often require reviewing academic and grey literature, searching practitioner forums and guidelines, and organising discussions with other organisations.

Program Management for Monitoring and Evaluation – 20% of your time

• Work with Taimaka’s executive director and nutrition program director to set quarterly priorities for the M+E team. Translate quarterly targets into monthly and weekly plans for the team.
• Provide day-to-day oversight of the M+E team (2-6 people), conduct performance reviews, provide training, and support team members’ professional development.
• Write job descriptions, advertise new roles, and assess applicants to hire new members of the M+E team as needed.
• Coordinate with external collaborators, like volunteer developers, data scientists, or researchers assisting on specific projects.

Future Growth Trajectories

Future growth trajectories for excelling hires could look like:

• Overseeing a growing team and budget as our program expands and our M+E department grows with it
• Several years down the line, helping set up new M+E teams as we expand to new states in Nigeria
• As part of your professional development, we could explore more technical routes like investing in coding training to do more in-depth work on our digital case management system

About You

This role will likely suit an early to mid-career public health or M+E specialist, or a very bright early to mid-career generalist capable of learning on the job. Our preference is for someone with a few years of work experience under their belt, but we may make exceptions for truly exceptional candidates.

If you are not sure whether you’re the right fit for the position, err on the side of applying. Our initial application is designed to be fairly painless to complete and our priority is finding candidates with high overall potential, an ability to learn, and who align with our core philosophy of cost-effectiveness and innovation, rather than who check specific boxes.

Must Haves:

Candidates must have the following to qualify:

• Bachelor’s degree or higher
• Past experience with:
  • Data analysis in either R OR Python Pandas
  • SQL OR proven competence in any non-statistical programming language (taken as evidence of your ability to quickly learn SQL)
• An ability to learn new skills, particularly by diving in headfirst and learning by doing
• An ability to set your own priorities and independently solve problems

Nice to Haves:

The more of these that describe you, the better, but none are required. Even if none of these describe you, but you feel like you are talented and can learn, err on the side of applying.

• Past experience with:
  • Technical:
    • An XLSForm based data collection platform (e.g., Open Data Kit, KoboCollect, SurveyCTO)
    • Python (general use, not for data analysis)
    • Metabase or similar BI/dashboarding software
    • Geospatial data collection and mapping using ArcGIS, QGIS or similar software
  • General:
    • Public health, humanitarian interventions, or biostatistics
    • Field experience in an LMIC, particularly if you were doing work related to data collection
    • Overseeing small teams (1-5 people)
    • Familiarity with GiveWell/Effective Altruist methods of evaluating cost-effectiveness
• A Master’s degree in public health, statistics, economics, or similar
• 2 years or more of work experience in M+E or 4 years or more of other work experience

Why Work At Taimaka

• A job with a large, tangible impact on the world – your work will drive a highly cost-effective global health program and save lives
• A high degree of autonomy and opportunity to shape Taimaka and our work as we continue a period of rapid growth
• A passionate and dynamic startup culture, with talented colleagues and the opportunity to take ownership of meaningful projects
• An opportunity to work in the field, directly with beneficiaries, and iteratively design and improve programming in a hands-on way.
• Challenging, but rewarding and stimulating work.

Why Not Work At Taimaka
Working at Taimaka may not be the right fit for everyone! If you aren’t comfortable with the following, this may not be the right job for you:

• Dealing with ambiguity
  • Taimaka is a maturing startup: there is a lot less bureaucracy and oversight than you would find at a larger organization. This can be good, in the sense that you can get hands on with projects and move fast, but it also means that you will typically receive less support from your manager than you might expect. You will need to set your own priorities and do a lot of independent problem solving in order to succeed.

How to apply

For candidates based in Nigeria.

For candidates based abroad.