Program Officer - Consultancy

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is among the world’s leading humanitarian relief and development organizations. For 80 years, the IRC has been at the forefront of every major humanitarian initiative to assist people uprooted by war, persecution, or civil conflict. IRC staff go to the toughest places, implement both immediate response and long lasting programs, and conduct the type of applied research and advocacy the aid community needs to continually push itself to find better solutions for people. In all its country programs and in the US, IRC teams partner with local governments, community organizations and private sector companies to achieve measurable improvements in people’s economic well-being, safety, health and education.

The IRC’s Airbel Impact Lab designs, tests, and scales life-changing, cost-effective solutions for people affected by conflict and disaster. By applying the IRC’s deep technical expertise and field experience with a range of skills from the behavioral sciences, human-centered design, rigorous research, and multi-disciplinary problem-solving in humanitarian contexts, we work to develop breakthrough solutions that combine creativity and rigor, openness and expertise, and a desire to think afresh with the experience of a large-scale implementing organization.

The Research Officer will work on a new health project within the Airbel Impact Lab supported by the Health Technical Unit called Dela. In partnership with Medic Mobile and Think-it, an engineering collective, we’re looking to build and test a digital tool to enhance supervision and support for Community Health Workers (CHWs). Dela is a video based remote supervision tool that helps CHW supervisors remotely supervise their CHWs. Due to COVID-19, supportive supervision will be more essential now than ever to ensure adherence to protocols and guidelines, especially as supervisors may not be able to travel out to CHWs to conduct supervision visits because they may be overwhelmed by cases at their health facilities.

In the next phases of work, the team in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo will work with designers and engineers to build, test and collect qualitative and quantitative data on the functionality and feasibility of Dela. The research officer will be based in the field and will be responsible for working with the design researcher to ensure the recruitment and participation of the ideal target population of CHWs, supervisors, community members and other stakeholders across a range of data and connectivity environments.

Major Responsibilities:

• Work collaboratively with the project leads, design researcher and stakeholders to plan and execute day-to-day learning needs in the DRC or Liberia.
• Directly support the recruitment of users and stakeholders (60+ user interviews and test participants)
• Develop segmentation of users
• Assist the design research team with translation, setting up data collection processes

Deliverables:

• User recruitment plan including strategies for recruiting and connecting with a range of users and data connectivity environments.
• Screeners that enable the proper filtering of potential research participants according to guidelines and criteria.
• Data collection platform management that enables the collection and sorting of user data and feedback.