SENIOR DIRECTOR IMPACT EVALUATION AND STRATEGIC LEARNING
CARE
United States
Posted on Dec 14, 2025
JOB SUMMARY:
CARE’s Program Strategy and Innovation (PSI) division is seeking a visionary Senior Director of Impact Evaluation and Strategic Learning to lead a transformation in how CARE uses evidence to drive impact. Reporting to the Executive Director of Evidence and Insight, you will champion a bold agenda: embedding rigorous, actionable evidence and cost-effectiveness analysis into every layer of CARE’s strategy and program design. This is not research for research’s sake—this is about making evidence a practical tool for decision-making, ensuring that CARE invests in what works and scales it efficiently.
You will set the standard for how CARE proves and improves impact, grounding our work in the best available external research while deploying fit-for-purpose evaluation approaches that range from randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental designs to rapid-cycle testing and complexity-aware modeling. Your mandate is threefold: synthesize global evidence to guide program choice; establish credible causal proof where it matters most; and build systems that continuously generate insights on cost-effectiveness and scalability. To achieve this, you will lead a high-performing team dedicated to generating rigorous new evidence and tracking project performance to meet the highest standards of evidence-driven programming. By doing so, you will position CARE as a global leader in evidence-informed development, ensuring that every dollar delivers maximum impact for the people we serve.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
Build and Lead a High-Performing Evidence & Impact Technical Hub
- Serve as the strategic anchor for the Evidence & Insight unit, transforming CARE’s unified research, evidence, and impact measurement functions into a best-in-class evidence engine. You will translate the high-level evidence strategy into a clear operational reality for the team, ensuring the right people, systems, and standards are in place to deliver.
- Cultivate a culture of intellectual honesty and rigor: Manage and mentor a high-performing, cross-functional team capable of executing complex evaluations.
- Build "Fit-for-Purpose" Capabilities: Assess and upgrade the team’s technical capabilities to deliver on the evidence strategy (Rigorous Impact Evaluations vs. Use of Big Data/Administrative Data vs. Lean Measurement vs. Networked/Catalytic Measurement). Ensure the team has the requisite skills in both econometrics and complexity-aware monitoring to execute the vision.
- Drive Operational Excellence & Quality Assurance: Foster a coherent network of practitioners that ensures every data point remains credible, defensible, and ready for external scrutiny. Ensure accountability for high quality evidence across a range of methodological approaches.
Architect the Evaluation Portfolio & Drive Causal Proof
- Serve as the organization’s chief scientific lead for high-rigor evidence, moving CARE beyond simple output tracking or before-after comparison toward causal attribution and scientific credibility.
- Strategic Evidence Curation: Lead the decision-making framework for how we evaluate, distinguishing between interventions requiring counterfactuals (RCTs, QED) versus those best suited for using large administrative data or lean impact measurement. Ensure resources are focused on generating high-quality evidence where it matters most (e.g. signature solutions).
- Oversee the Impact Evaluation Pipeline: Directly supervise the design and execution of a portfolio of rigorous impact evaluations to establish causal links between CARE’s work and downstream outcomes. Sharply prioritize the pipeline to ensure that we are focused on the smallest number of feasible evidence opportunities that will deliver the biggest difference to CARE's work and the sector. (This includes knowing where to deprioritize investments in places where we are not set up for success).
- Academic & Strategic Partnerships: Serve as the primary technical counterpart for high-level research partners, ensuring CARE’s methodologies withstand external scientific scrutiny and contributing to the broader development sector's body of knowledge through peer-reviewed publications and white papers.
- Research Ethics & Integrity: Enhance and lead CARE’s internal review processes to ensure all evaluation activities adhere to the highest ethical standards and methodological integrity, including the ethical use of AI in research and evaluation.
Lead Innovation in Measuring Systems Change & Catalytic Impact
- Recognizing that transformative impact often occurs through systemic change that RCTs cannot capture, this role will lead the frontier of measuring "Networked Impact" or "Catalytic Impact"—developing novel methodologies to prove how CARE’s influence unlocks government capital and shifts market systems.
- Model Catalytic & Networked Impact: Refine CARE's methodologies to model and measure the leverage of CARE’s work, specifically how our investments unlock capital, influence government policy, or shift market systems (impact that goes beyond direct service delivery) that lead to positive changes in people's lives.
- Systems-Level Measurement: Lead the team in utilizing complexity-aware monitoring approaches (e.g., Outcome Harvesting, Contribution Analysis) to assess advocacy wins and systems change where counterfactuals are not possible.
Drive Evidence-Based Decision Making & Strategic Pivots
- Lead the generation, synthesis, and mobilization of insights from rigorous data-driven research and evaluation, and catalytic modeling to inform CARE's strategic direction and improve impact.
- Drive Program Strategy & Pivots: Synthesize findings to challenge assumptions and guide leadership on 'Program Choice'—providing data-driven recommendations on which interventions to scale and, crucially, which to sunset/stop when evidence suggests they are not cost-effective.
- Own the Evidence Landscape: Conduct systematic reviews of external evidence (e.g., J-PAL, 3ie) to benchmark CARE’s performance against the sector, ensuring we are not reinventing the wheel but adopting what is proven to work.
- Collaborative stakeholder engagement: Work effectively across a variety of stakeholders: engage constructively with country offices, research partners in the global south, and governments or private sector in places where we are aiming to build scaling strategies to deliver evidence that drives action and uptake.
- Vision 2030 Strategy and Accountability: Oversee the aggregation of this diverse data (direct, networked impact, and catalytic leverage) to report credibly against CARE’s FY26-30 Strategy goals and Vision 2030 targets, ensuring the organization can tell a unified impact story.
- Participant-Centered Inquiry: Champion the integration of real-time participant feedback and community insights into evaluation and learning frameworks. Ensure that "rigor" includes the voices of the people we serve, using these insights to drive programmatic adaptation and continuous learning.
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