Jobs and Careers

Consultant - Researcher, Economic Opportunities - Remote

United States, United StatesRemotefull_timeVerifiedPosted 18 Jun 2024

About the role

About Mercy Corps Mercy Corps is a leading global organization powered by the belief that a better world is possible. In disaster, in hardship, in more than 40 countries around the world, we partner to put bold solutions into action — helping people triumph over adversity and build stronger communities from within. The Program / Department / Team Mercy Corps is committed to generating and using evidence to understand and improve our impact, and to enhance the humanitarian and development community’s ability to address the world’s most complex challenges. The Research and Learning team advances Mercy Corps’ commitment to produce and use evidence to improve our impact, scale what works, and influence others. We know that our external influence and internal learning are most effective when underpinned by substantive research on issues where we have expertise and a credible voice. Mercy Corps 10-year strategy– the Pathway to Possibility– is an evidence-driven commitment to addressing conflict and climate change as drivers of fragility. To do so and move from crisis to opportunity we must partner with communities, local NGOs, governments, and the private sector. As part of this, we have prioritized strengthening economic opportunities to enable crisis-affected communities to grow and sustain their assets and income. Mercy Corps is seeking to expand our evidence and learning on what works to enhance economic opportunities in fragile and conflict affected contexts. To date, Mercy Corps has developed a global evidence and learning agenda on economic opportunities, outlining priority research themes and questions that address evidence gaps and align with our programming and advocacy work on economic opportunity issues. Purpose / Project Description Mercy Corps is seeking a Researcher (Consultant) to work closely with a dynamic team and lead/support on a discrete set of activities to further our evidence-driven commitment. This includes helping identify strategic evidence generation opportunities within the economic opportunities portfolio; promoting internal and external learning on priority thematic areas; and supporting influence initiatives ahead of and during key external events. The consultant must have a background in quantitative and/or qualitative data collection and analysis; be able to write in simple, clear and concise language for non-technical audiences; have a good understanding of how research findings link to program decisions; and have good networking and relationship-building skills to work with Mercy Corps’ programs/Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning teams, country leadership, and research partner on co-creating evidence and learning opportunities. The consultant will lead/support on the following activities: Evidence Production and Implementation:

Conduct an exploratory /retrospective analysis of Mercy Corps’ cash and market price data, layered on various shocks and crises, to understand the potential for how this data might be leveraged for early warning applications.
Support the execution of new and ongoing studies, including working closely with internal and external researchers and technical experts, data analysts and partners in study design, implementation, analysis, report writing and sense making.
Support the development of new research concept notes and/or proposals including through literature reviews, helping identify potential countries/programs where this research can be implemented and identifying and engaging with internal and external context experts to investigate these topics.

Evidence Synthesis and Learning Initiatives:

Synthesize Mercy Corps’ internal learning briefs/case studies from countries/regions on priority themes

-- financial inclusion, youth employment, and market systems approaches including those that are implemented in thin markets and that target forcibly displaced populations.

Situate findings and learnings from these syntheses pieces within the external evidence including studies and reports from peer organizations to identify macrotrends; develop talk