Director, Strategic Research & Evidence

Role Overview

This position owns World Vision International's applied research and learning agenda: the work of turning child-level data gathered through annual impact measurement, programme monitoring, evaluations and commissioned studies into evidence that leaders, programme teams and external partners can act on. Day to day, it means framing researchable questions, commissioning and quality-assuring studies, brokering academic partnerships, and shaping how findings land in programme design, fundraising, advocacy and executive decisions. Ownership of analytics, dashboards, data products and analytical services stays with Child Data Analytics & Insights; this role concentrates on interpretation, insight and uptake.

Key Responsibilities

• Direct applied research and evidence synthesis drawing on annual impact measurement data, programme monitoring, evaluations, operational research and commissioned studies, setting interpretation standards that cover methods, uncertainty, the boundaries of what can reasonably be claimed, reproducibility and responsible use of sensitive data.
• Deliver the annual impact measurement insight narrative as a research and learning product, converting Global Strategy (Our Promise, Phase 3) priorities and senior-leadership questions into answerable research questions, data stories and decision-support outputs.
• Commission and lead secondary analyses of the 400,000+ household impact measurement dataset and other evidence sources to generate cross-country insight on child wellbeing, resilience, vulnerability, equity and integrated sector outcomes.
• Sequence and oversee the OP3 applied research portfolio, spanning Integrated Child Wellbeing Pathways, Christian faith and spiritual nurture, climate stress and child resilience, long-term community transformation, and local-to-global systems change.
• Develop, approve and quality-assure study designs, including theories of change, protocols, TORs and RFPs, analysis plans, sampling approaches, ethics and IRB pathways, data-use agreements, publication plans and acceptance criteria across mixed-methods, longitudinal, ex-post, quasi-experimental and comparative work.
• Build university and research-institution partnerships through co-PI arrangements, advisory groups, fellowship pipelines, data access protocols and authorship plans, and represent the organisation's research agenda with academic partners, donors, foundations and external evidence networks.
• Define an evidence-to-decision pathway for every major research product, naming the decision owner, intended use, audience, timing, format and measure of uptake in advance, then track whether studies genuinely improve decisions, get used externally or contribute to resource mobilisation.
• Lead and coach a leveraged research platform of core researchers, commissioned consultants, university partners