Senior Research Associate

• Job TitleSenior Research Associate
• OrganisationSpark MicroGrants
• Reports ToSenior Research Director
• LocationUganda, Rwanda or Malawi
• Experience5–10 years in applied quantitative research
• DeadlineRolling

Spark MicroGrants believes in a world where everyone lives with dignity and determines their own positive future. It has worked in 1,000+ villages in 6 countries and pioneered a community-driven development model in sub-Saharan Africa.

Its model combines facilitated village meetings with a small discretionary grant to catalyse local action, and it works with NGO and government partners, including the World Bank, to scale the approach.

The Senior Research Associate designs, manages and delivers high-quality research on Spark’s model and helps the wider sector generate and use evidence.

Project Ownership

• Own research projects from initiation to delivery, including work plans, budgets and timelines.
• Lead quantitative research from design and measurement through analysis and dissemination.
• Ensure rigour, quality and research ethics.

Data Collection and Analysis

• Develop reproducible workflows with documented code and version control.
• Program, test and deploy survey instruments.
• Prepare research datasets and analyse quantitative, qualitative and geospatial data.
• Turn findings into visualisations, briefs, reports and presentations.

Team Contribution

• Understand Spark’s monitoring systems and use them for process evaluations.
• Strengthen team-wide research tools, templates and quality standards.
• Collaborate with programme teams so research answers organisational priorities.

Education and Experience

• Master’s degree in social sciences, data science, evaluation, international development or a related field.
• 5–10 years of applied quantitative research, evaluation or policy research in low- and middle-income countries.
• Experience with RCTs, quasi-experimental methods or other evaluation approaches.
• Strong skills in regression, hypothesis testing, sampling and statistical inference.

Tools

• Stata or R, and CommCare or SurveyCTO; LaTeX preferred.
• Git and reproducible analytical workflows.
• Strong English writing for donor reports, proposals, blogs and op-eds.

Technical Skills

• Stata / R: Statistical analysis.
• SurveyCTO / CommCare: Digital data collection.
• Git: Version control.
• Evaluation design: RCTs and quasi-experiments.

Soft Skills

• Clear writing: Many audiences.
• Ownership: Independent delivery.
• Rigour: Ethics and quality.
• Collaboration: Multidisciplinary teams.

Salary is based on geographic location and commensurate with experience. Spark offers a community of thought partners, autonomy to shape your role and respect for work-life balance.

• Rigorous evaluation work.
• Based from Uganda.
• Shape evidence for national scale.
• Mission-driven research team.
• Strong pick among research jobs in Uganda.

Apply online through Spark MicroGrants’ careers portal. You will need a CV and answers to Spark’s screening questions, including your salary expectation and which countries you can work from. Screening questions cover AI in research and handling data mistakes.

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis and Spark may close the process at any time, so apply early. See more NGO jobs in Uganda.

• Share an evaluation you led.
• Mention Stata or R projects.
• Show reproducible code habits.
• State Uganda as your base.
• Apply early, it’s rolling.