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Lead Economist

Laterite is looking for an outstanding researcher / economist to provide global technical leadership to our teams, to support the professional development of researchers at Laterite and to grow our portfolio of research projects and establish new strategic learning partnerships.

 

Application Form: Direct link

 

Laterite is a data, research, and technical advisory firm that helps clients understand and analyze complex development challenges. We work with universities, global think tanks, international NGOs, multilateral donor organizations, and government ministries and agencies. Our clients include, for example, the World Bank, USAID, TechnoServe, Promundo, the Mastercard Foundation, and several UN agencies.

Our network of offices currently includes the Netherlands, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The team brings together more than 55 full time local and international staff, as well as 1,000 enumerators across countries, in a dynamic work environment. We are proud to be a culturally diverse organization. Learn more: www.laterite.com

Laterite’s Lead Economist will:

  • Provide technical leadership to our global teams. This will involve overseeing our technical research projects, reviewing outputs at each stage of the research process and responding to technical questions coming from the team.
  • Continuously strengthen the quality of our work, by identifying systemic fixes and ways to improve our research and quality review processes, by ensuring Laterite is always at the cutting edge and by putting the right systems in place to our work is useful within the context of the countries and the sectors we work in.
  • Grow our portfolio of research projects and strategic learning partnerships, by working closely with our business development and communications team to identify new opportunities and lead the technical component of proposals, by growing our network of academic partnerships and by representing Laterite at research/policy events.
  • Contribute high quality external publications, in the form of blogs, policy briefs, papers, to increase the visibility of our work and contribute to the policy dialogue in the countries/sectors where we work.

Profile

We are looking for an accomplished economist/research who combines excellent technical skills with experience in mentoring and managing teams of researchers. Our future colleague has:

  • Postgraduate degree (ideally a PhD) in economics, development economics, statistics, or related field with a strong component of quantitative data analysis
  • At least 7 years of research work experience acquired in academia, a public policy or social research organization, or management consulting (or 5 years if you have a PhD)
  • Demonstrated experience in leading and mentoring researchers.
  • Strong skills in relevant areas for Laterite’s technical work, including research design, sampling, analysis of survey data, program evaluation techniques and econometrics
  • Demonstrated interest in Laterite’s core sectors: education, public health, agriculture, youth & livelihoods, and urbanization & migration.
  • Demonstrated experience in writing and editing grant applications, research papers and scientific output reports
  • Proficiency in STATA is required. Knowledge of R and/or Python is a strong plus.

 

Examples of our research and our work:

 

Application Process

We invite you to submit your CV and complete our application form, which includes a couple of questions about your research and interests. At the end of this application, you will be sent a link to a 5-minute quantitative assessment, for which no preparation is needed. The assessment must be completed within one week of submitting your application.

We will contact successful applicants to discuss next steps.

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply ASAP.