TECHNICAL ADVISOR – COST ANALYSIS At CARE USA

Job Summary:

CARE works around the globe to save lives, defeat poverty and achieve social justice. We seek a world of hope, inclusion and social justice, where poverty has been overcome and all people live with dignity and security, with a specific focus on the empowerment of women and girls.

As part of a focus on program quality and impact, CARE seeks to document and learn about the cost efficiency and effectiveness of its work. CARE participates in a consortium with other INGOs that uses the Dioptra platform to conduct cost efficiency and effectiveness analysis.

Dioptra is an online tool to conduct cost analysis consistently, quickly, rigorously to generate high-quality evidence. It imports finance data and uses a consistent methodology to calculate the cost per output of an activity. Results can be meaningfully compared to identify opportunities for program learning and improvement. This position will expand use of the tool and the results of costing analysis across CARE’s project portfolio.

Responsibilities:

1. Conduct cost analysis of program interventions
   • Identify opportunities within country/technical teams for cost analysis in line with organizational strategy, learning agendas, and donor requirements.
   • Collaborate with country/technical teams to collect programmatic information on context, implementation approach, M&E data, and finance data of program interventions to be analyzed.
   • Conduct cost-efficiency analysis of interventions together with country/technical teams and apply results for adaptive management or program improvement.
2. Strengthen capacity of staff and partners for cost analysis
   • Strengthen capacity within country/technical teams and partners to understand how cost analysis can support program quality and inform adaptations, when to incorporate it into their work plans or learning agendas, how to conduct or facilitate cost analyses on their own, and how to translate into quality knowledge products, actionable insights and strategic decision-making.
3. Knowledge management and learning
   • Create high-quality knowledge products to effectively translate cost analyses (case studies, reports, peer-reviewed publications) and present them to internal and external audiences, to build organizational understanding of what cost-efficiency data can do to support decision-making.
   • Maintain program-specific databases of cost-efficiency data, relevant program information, and knowledge products.
   • Share learning with the Humanitarian & Development Cost Analysis Consortium.
4. Oversee maintenance and enhancement of cost analysis platform and document repository
   • Collaborate with Finance/IT/Digital departments to enable all country teams to conduct cost-efficiency analysis easily and readily with the required finance data.
   • Collaborate with IT/Digital to manage the tool’s user access and configuration and respond to issues faced by country/technical teams using Dioptra. Provide input on bugs, challenges or new features in the Dioptra tool, to improve workflows.
   • Collaborate with IT/Digital leads to maintain an accessible document repository.

Qualification:

• University degree in economics, statistics, public policy, international development, or related field.
• 5 years of experience in managing technical program implementation, monitoring & evaluation, research and project budgets in humanitarian or development contexts.
• Excellent data analysis and interpretation skills, capable of translating data into actionable insights.
• Experience coordinating and collaborating with cross-departmental teams across multiple countries.
• Excellent written, visual, and verbal communication skills and cross-cultural sensitivity.
• Fluency in spoken and written English required.