Executive Vice President, Evidence

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. This role is for a rigorous, skeptical leader: you will build the teams, systems, and standards that make sure our cost-effectiveness models, evaluations, and monitoring data are right. Everything you do will rest on analytical judgment:t: the evidence strategy you set, the systems you build, and the scale-up and wind-down decisions you shape are only as sound as your ability to tell strong evidence from weak. We are therefore looking first for exceptional analytical depth, combined with the ability to lead. Our recent Dispensers for Safe Water update reflects the transparent, evidence-first culture this role will help lead, however, we want this role to make sure we find problems like that one ourselves, early.

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

Your own analytical judgment is at the center of each part of this work:

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

• Personally examine the analysis behind major decisions: how key numbers were produced, what they depend on, and how they could be wrong. Model the skepticism you expect from your teams.
• 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 support program teams

• Build internal technical management capacity that benefits 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 applying evidence to real program and policy decisions. You may come from a research and evaluation organization (such as J-PAL, IPA, IDinsight, or a World Bank evaluation unit), an implementing organization, a funder, or a university. What matters is a track record of using serious analysis to change what programs actually do. Above all, you combine the analytical depth to judge evidence yourself with the ability to lead.

Essential

• Analytical depth. A PhD in economics, epidemiology, biostatistics, or a related quantitative field, or equivalent experience, with a strong record in impact evaluation (randomized and quasi-experimental methods), survey measurement and data quality, and cost-effectiveness or decision modeling. You can look at a cost-effectiveness model, an evaluation, or a monitoring report and quickly see what drives the answer, what is weak, and what it would take to know more. Backgrounds in development economics, applied economics, epidemiology, and health economics are all welcome.
• The skepticism to find problems and the courage to act on them. You notice when numbers look too good, when monitoring data and independent data disagree, or when a model rests on a weak assumption, and you dig in before outside reviewers do. 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 know how programs and data collection work on the ground, from managing programs or from running large field evaluations or surveys in low- and middle-income countries, so you lead as an insider rather than from a distance.
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• 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.

Preferred

• Experience with GiveWell-style cost-effectiveness analysis, including sensitivity and uncertainty analysis; designing monitoring systems with independent verification (back-checks, re-surveys); running experiments at scale, ideally with governments; leading teams of PhD-level analysts.

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 role. The output is better decisions, not papers, though we welcome sharing what we learn, including through research, when it serves the work.

Location

Location is flexible. You may be based in Washington, DC (our US office), elsewhere in the United States, or in a country where Evidence Action has an office; India, Kenya, and Nigeria are of particular interest. Wherever you are based, field presence is essential: expect roughly 20–30% travel, much of it to program sites, with more in the first year.

Benefits

We consider multiple factors when determining the base salary for a role, including but not limited to: role scope, program budgets, internal equity, and a candidate’s qualifications and/or prior experience. Pay and benefits will be commensurate with the role specifications, local statutory requirements, and the cost of labor in the markets where we operate.

For US based roles, Evidence Action provides comprehensive benefits including international health care, HSA/FSA options, life insurance, disability coverage, retirement plans with a matching component, generous and flexible leave options, as well as other employee perks on a reimbursement basis. For more information visit our website or ask our recruiting team!

For US based, the pay range for this role is $210k - $230k.

Evidence Action is an Equal Opportunity Employer with a commitment to diversity. All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply.