Program Improvement Associate at Taimaka At Taimaka

Application Deadline: Rolling, with a final closure no later than January 31st, 2025. Applications may close sooner if a suitable candidate is found.

Expected Hours: 40 hours/week (full time)

Location: Gombe, Nigeria

Compensation: Dependent on need and experience. For expatriate staff, Taimaka will also provide housing, fund visa costs, and reimburse twice per year international travel to/from Nigeria.

Reports To: Research and Program Improvement Director

Start Date: As soon as possible, ideally February 2025.

Summary

We’re looking for an enterprising early career to mid career professional to join Taimaka’s Program Improvement team and lead projects designed to drive forward the cutting-edge of malnutrition treatment implementation, improve program outcomes, reduce costs, and save more lives. This is a hybrid role, covering implementation and research, where you will design and implement ideas to improve the cost-effectiveness of our programming, and then evaluate the impact of those ideas. You won’t be running huge trials or massive surveys: the focus here is on pre/post assessments and quick turnaround projects. Expect a wide variation of projects and tasks, from biometric verification one quarter to hybridized therapeutic food dosing protocols the next.

While a background in public health or global development is helpful, what we’re really looking for here is someone who wants to come into our programs, dive into the details, and obsess about how to implement better than we are now. If you can move fast, think rigorously, implement quickly, and want to become a subject matter expert on acute malnutrition and how to treat it, you fit the position. Taimaka is planning to treat 75,000 children with severe acute malnutrition over the next three years. You will help shape the protocols we use to do that. If done right, you can help us save more lives than we would have otherwise.

About Taimaka

Taimaka is a highly cost-effective, Founder’s Pledge recommended nonprofit that delivers reimagined pediatric malnutrition treatment to save the lives of the world’s most vulnerable children. We implement a modified form of community management of acute malnutrition (CMAM) treatment targeting children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in Gombe State, Nigeria. We are currently dramatically expanding our treatment program to reach 15k patients with SAM in 2025, 25k patients in 2026, and 35k patients in 2027. You can read more about our work here.

About the Job

A portion of Taimaka’s work is dedicated to identifying ways we can improve the implementation of acute malnutrition treatment in our program. Over the years, these innovation efforts have led to a couple of key advances, like creating a digital case management application for our field staff to guide them through the treatment process, implementing a reduced RUTF dosage protocol for the first time in Nigeria, and integrating complementary food for the treatment of moderate acute malnutrition into a facility-based program. These advances are a key part of the reason our cost-per-child-treated is less than half that of the average NGO in northeastern Nigeria, and we’re keen to drive our cost-effectiveness even higher through new advances.

As an associate on our Program Improvement team, you would be in charge of running key innovation projects designed to improve our programming. While there is an element of research and evaluation to these projects, our goal is to avoid large-scale research trials and focus on quicker turnaround initiatives that are responsive to program needs. Think less abstract/academic research and more iterative design. A few examples of projects we are considering for 2025 are:

1. Integrating ORS/Zinc co-pack distribution into our mass screenings for acute malnutrition cases to save additional lives, along with a post-distribution follow-up data collection round to verify that households actually received the packs and understand when and how to use them.
2. Creating a biometric identification solution to track patient enrollment and improve identification of patients across time and facilities. This would involve identifying a developer who could implement this solution, project managing the implementation of it into our existing tech stack, and working with the programs team to roll the solution out.
3. Do a sprint on overhauling our care protocols for under-six months children based on the latest research and published guidance from the WHO. Interview with experts at other organizations to incorporate their lessons learned. Team up with the programs team to roll out these new protocols and do a pre/post analysis to understand what effect they have.

Our goal in hiring for this position is to find someone who can embed closely with our programs team and spend substantial time every week out in our facilities, understanding pain points and problems. We want someone who will obsess about optimizing implementation, and who can add capacity to our existing program improvement team to form the missing link between identifying a good idea and actually developing it into something actionable.

You would report to our Research and Program Improvement director, who would assist in setting priorities and identifying projects for you to work on. However, once you are assigned to a project, we will expect you to work independently, recruiting additional staff as needed, planning implementation, and executing, with guidance and mentoring from your supervisor. In this role, you will likely oversee 1-2 mid-level managers along with a variable number of field personnel to collect data or perform similar tasks.

We evaluate the cost-effectiveness of our programming in the GiveWell/Effective Altruist style, meaning we judge the success or failure of our program improvement projects based on whether they reduce our estimated cost-per-life saved. You will be expected to learn how to model cost-effectiveness in this way, and incorporate it into your decision making.

Specific Responsibilities

Manage Implementation of Specific Program Improvement Projects – 75% of your time

Planning and Setup – 35% of this chunk of time

• Once assigned to a project, draft plans on how to go about implementing it. You may receive a very specific brief, or a more general task like “figure out novel ways to reduce nonresponse.”
  • You will likely need to carry out literature reviews and other research, like expert interviews, to identify possible strategies, and then develop a preferred approach out of that research.
• Draft protocols to implement the project, as well as an evaluation strategy to efficiently/frugally study its impact.
• Hire and train staff members required to to carry out the project (for instance, a team of temporary field enumerators).
• Create paper forms, supervision documents, Open Data Kit (ODK) digital forms, and other necessary tools to implement the project.

Implementation – 50% of this chunk of time

• Project manage the implementation of the idea: set timelines, ensure they are met, troubleshoot issues as they arise
• Monitor implementation and data quality by conducting weekly meetings with your junior staff, writing R or Python code to pull and clean any necessary data for checks, including by cross-checking program and survey data
• Design and implement feedback loops to ensure identified problems are effectively addressed in a timely manner
• Provide day-to-day oversight of your team, conduct performance reviews, provide training, and support team members’ professional development.

Analysis – 15% of this chunk of time

• After the conclusion of projects, write up reports on lessons learned
• Carry out statistical analysis of any evaluation data to determine whether the project had the desired impact
• Use impact and cost data to make recommendations as to whether the project should be incorporated into the CMAM program permanently, abandoned, or further iterated upon
• If adopting the project, write protocols and work with the core CMAM program team to institutionalize it within their activities

Identify Future Program Improvement Projects – 15% of your time

• Embed with the CMAM program team, spend time in Taimaka treatment facilities, interview staff – generally work to have very good context across the treatment program on what is working well, what isn’t, and what could work better
  • Get in the weeds, obsess about details
• Speak with experts and implementers at other organizations, understand what they are thinking about and see as potential ways to improve treatment outcomes and reduce costs
• Stay up to date on published literature in acute malnutrition treatment and related fields, as well as grey literature. Suggest ideas as they come to you, no matter how out there!
• Work with the Research and Program Improvement director to conduct back-of-the-envelope cost-effectiveness assessments of new ideas to prioritize them for implementation

Mentor Program Improvement Fellows

• Taimaka typically has 1-2 fellows per year (typically MPH students doing a practicum) come to Gombe to work on specific projects.
• You would support the Research and Program Improvement director in showing these fellows the ropes of Gombe, helping them understand our program, and give them tips on how to go about executing on their own projects.

Future Growth Trajectories

If you excel in this role, you will become a leading expert on the cutting edge of acute malnutrition treatment programming, and accumulate a large store of knowledge and experience on implementing global health programming in a developing context.

At Taimaka, you could end up managing a larger team and budget on an expanding set of more ambitious research and innovation projects as you demonstrate your ability to successfully identify and implement improvements to CMAM programming. You could also parlay this experience into starting your own organization or pivoting to work on a portfolio at a grantmaker or large INGO focused on institutionalizing more cost-effective solutions to global health challenges across implementers.

About You

This role will likely suit an early to mid-career public health/global development professional, or a very bright early to mid-career generalist capable of learning on the job. Our preference is for someone with a few years of work experience under their belt, but we may make exceptions for truly exceptional candidates. We’re looking for someone who wants to become obsessed with optimizing malnutrition treatment to save as many lives as possible. We don’t really care what your background is as long as you are willing to put in the work to become a world-leading subject matter expert.

If you are not sure whether you’re the right fit for the position, err on the side of applying. Our initial application is designed to be fairly painless to complete and our priority is finding candidates with high overall potential, an ability to learn, and who align with our core philosophy of cost-effectiveness and innovation, rather than who check specific boxes.

Must Haves:

Candidates must have the following to qualify:

• Bachelor’s degree or higher
• Past experience with:
  • Data analysis in either R OR Python Pandas
  • SQL OR proven competence in any non-statistical programming language (taken as evidence of your ability to quickly learn SQL)
• An ability to learn new skills, particularly by diving in headfirst and learning by doing
• An ability to set your own priorities and independently solve problems

Nice to Haves:

The more of these that describe you, the better, but none are required. Even if none of these describe you, but you feel like you are talented and can learn, err on the side of applying.

• Past experience with:
  • Technical:
    • An XLSForm based data collection platform (e.g., Open Data Kit, KoboCollect, SurveyCTO)
    • Geospatial data collection and mapping using ArcGIS, QGIS or similar software
  • General:
    • Public health, humanitarian interventions, or biostatistics
    • Field experience in an LMIC, particularly if you were doing work related to data collection
    • Overseeing small teams (1-5 people)
    • Familiarity with GiveWell/Effective Altruist methods of evaluating cost-effectiveness
• A Master’s degree in public health, statistics, economics, or similar
• 1 year or more of work experience in field research or 2-3 or more years of other work experience

Why Work At Taimaka

• A job with a large, tangible impact on the world – your work will drive a highly cost-effective global health program and save lives
• A high degree of autonomy and opportunity to shape Taimaka and our work as we continue a period of rapid growth
• A passionate and dynamic startup culture, with talented colleagues and the opportunity to take ownership of meaningful projects
• An opportunity to work in the field, directly with beneficiaries, and iteratively design and improve programming in a hands-on way.
• Challenging, but rewarding and stimulating work.

Why Not Work At Taimaka
Working at Taimaka may not be the right fit for everyone! If you aren’t comfortable with the following, this may not be the right job for you:

• Dealing with ambiguity
  • Taimaka is a maturing startup: there is a lot less bureaucracy and oversight than you would find at a larger organization. This can be good, in the sense that you can get hands on with projects and move fast, but it also means that you will typically receive less support from your manager than you might expect. You will need to set your own priorities and do a lot of independent problem solving in order to succeed.