Short Term - Program Associate - Hyderabad

Position Summary

Center for Effective Governance in Indian States (CEGIS) seeks a qualified applicant for the position of Research Associate to support an impact evaluation in Telangana. The project is focused on the effectiveness of the state’s agriculture extension officers by leveraging village institutions to facilitate farmer outreach and input rental.

The position offers an opportunity to gain first-hand experience implementing a randomized controlled trial at cutting-edge development research. The associate will have the opportunity to work closely with a PhD student at UC San Diego who is advised by Professor Karthik Murdhalaran and with the CEGIS team who are also led by Prof. Karthik Murdhalaran. The associate will be responsible for both analyzing administrative data provided by the department and driving implementation with the department.

This is a short 6-month research assistant type experience with the potential to either continue to work with CEGIS to scale-up the policy intervention or get strong recommendation letters for other more traditional research assistant jobs. The associate would have the opportunity to work closely with the JPAL team leading the data collection for this project. The position will be based out of Hyderabad, with frequent trips to the study districts.

Role and Responsibilities

The CEGIS Agriculture team has been working with the Department of Agriculture, Government of Telangana to improve the efficacy of its agricultural extension service. In addition to a randomized controlled trial focused on improving the efficacy of extensionists to promote agricultural technology, the team is also working to improve the general performance management of the expansionists and increase the reliability of the administrative data they produce. Understanding this administrative data is both crucial for outcome measurement in the impact evaluation and shaping government policy. As part of the project, the team gets huge sets of data which needs to be cleaned, analyzed and used for policy level changes. The associate will work with these datasets while also driving forward implementation of the intervention for the RCT with the department. Broadly:

He/She will be responsible for following up with department officials to ensure necessary elements of the agricultural extension intervention are implemented
He/She will speak to the involved frontline bureaucrats in Telugu at training for the project. He/She will ensure that the content at the training aligns with the implementation plan.
He/She will be responsible for the deep dive analysis of data for programme improvement. The person will be doing analysis of the large volume of data accumulated through our programme implementation by applying statistics, modeling, etc. and contribute in improving the efficiency of the programme. The candidate will also support the team in developing customized templates for data collection and various reporting purposes.
Coordinate with the department of agriculture to ensure the agriculture extension is being implemented according to plan.
Travel to the relevant pilot districts both to understand the sources of the administrative data and facilitate implementation of the intervention.
Generate high quality formal analytical reports on key program delivery outcomes.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams, and parent department to understand their needs, formulate and complete end-to-end analysis that includes data gathering, analysis and create presentations

Required Skills, Characteristics and Qualities

Fluency in Telugu and English
Working knowledge of data analysis tools such as R and Stata
Technical capability and familiarity with dashboarding tools (e.g., R, PowerBI, Tableau, Python, etc.) is a plus
Familiarity with GIS tools like QGIS is a plus.

Personal Characteristics and Desired Qualities

Flexible, self-motivating, able to manage multiple tasks efficiently, and team player
Ability to deal with unstructured and changing environments
Experience in the agricultural sector is a plus
Experience working in rural India is a plus
Experience working with the Indian Government at the State and District levels is a plus

Location and Compensation

This role will be based out of Hyderabad, and the candidate should be willing to travel, when needed. Remuneration will be competitive with Indian philanthropy and social sector pay scales and will depend on the candidate’s experience levels.

Interested candidates are requested to submit their application here.

Pre-reads for the application process

Podcast episodes with Prof. Karthik Muralidharan – one each on education and healthcare in India. You are also encouraged to read more of Prof. Karthik Muralidharan’s work here.

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