Director of Impact and Cost-Effectiveness

Summary of the Position 

Semilla Nueva is recruiting a Director of Impact and Cost-Effectiveness to lead the oversight and management of impact and monitoring systems to enable rapid insights and adaptation, development and publishing of research with academic collaborators, communicating findings with government and policy stakeholders and leading on cost-effectiveness analysis to support a rapidly-growing organization reach scale. This position is negotiable to include protected research time and will have the potential to lead the publication of papers using previously collected data. This position will report to and collaborate closely with the Executive Director, supervise a M&E manager and several survey staff. The position is Guatemala based or remote with travel to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. 

We are looking for a passionate, creative, and outgoing leader who wants to help use rigorous data collection and impact evaluation to continuously evaluate and improve our model, positively influence public policy and guide donor priorities in order to improve the nutritional intake of millions of people in the next 3-5 years. 

Summary of the Organization 

Semilla Nueva is one of Central America’s leading social enterprises with a team of over 60 in Guatemala, El Salvador, and the United States. The organization develops high-yielding, climate-resilient maize seeds that have been conventionally bred (non-GMO) to have higher levels of the most important missing nutrients: zinc, iron, and quality protein. Our approach to large-scale adoption of these seeds relies on three strategies: 

1. Breeding commercially competitive biofortified seeds (non-GMO), which increase incomes and nutritional intake for farmers;
2. Piloting subsidies to seed companies to profitably sell new, higher-yielding, climate resilient, biofortified seeds at prices the poorest of the poor can afford;
3. Working with governments to institutionalize these subsidies.

Our goal is for a minimal amount of subsidy to support hundreds of thousands of farming families to use biofortified seeds, consume biofortified maize, and sell biofortified maize into the market, while improving their incomes. The biofortified maize sold in the market will be purchased and eaten by millions of poor consumers, improving the nutrition of these populations. Our seed was sold by five seed companies in 2024 in Guatemala, reaching over 30,000 farmers and feeding nearly 1 million people. Our seed is in testing by the governments of El Salvador and Honduras, and in development for Eastern Africa. 

Semilla Nueva is a data-driven organization that conducts high-quality data collection annually for continuous monitoring and collaborates with academic researchers to contribute to knowledge generation for the public good. A small overview of relevant studies, including ours, on biofortified maize can be found here. In the past,

Semilla Nueva has collaborated with researchers at the University of Colorado Denver, Cornell University, Paris School of Economics, University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin. 

Qualifications 

Required: 

• PhD in nutrition, public health, public policy, economics, agricultural economics or related field and experience managing teams, or master’s degree with proven experience conducting high-quality research. 
• Adaptable, thoughtful, and responsive to data to bridge the gap between rigorous data collection and strategic decisions to help Semilla Nueva scale operations. 
• Proven experience in quantitative research design, implementation, data analysis to measure impact. Open to experience from a range of sectors, with preference for agriculture, economics, health, and/or nutrition. 
• Experience organizing workflows and leading data collection teams. Including drawing samples, survey programming, running data quality checks, and setting up dashboards to monitor data quality. 
• Experience communicating statistical and technical information to various audiences, including colleagues, leadership, and external collaborators. 
• Experience interrogating outcome measurement strategies to ensure that data collected aligns with strategic goals. 
• Experience cleaning raw data sets, setting up reproducible analysis, and data storage protocols.
• Proficiency in Stata, R, or Python, or other software with strong quantitative and qualitative research skills. 
• Demonstrated leadership, supervisory and conflict-management skills. 
• Proven track record of delivering results on-time and on-budget. 
• Strong technical writing abilities. 
• Strong networking and inter-organizational collaboration skills. 
• Experience compiling data analysis for reports to internal and external stakeholders – including creating tables and graphs, describing methodologies, and tracking sample sizes. 
• Fluent in written and spoken English, experience in technical writing in English. 

Desired: 

• Experience at an international NGO, preferably living in a developing context. 
• Experience working in Latin America. 
• Program management experience. 
• Experience managing workflows in survey programming software such as in SurveyCTO, ODK, or Kobo Collect. 
• Advanced Spanish. 

Expectations 

• Ability to work independently, proactively, and prioritize/coordinate a variety of activities
• Ability to represent organizational values and develop strategy in a senior leadership role
• Ability to work effectively in a multicultural team 
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, constantly evolving work environment
  

Specific Tasks 

• Monitoring and Evaluation
  • Evaluate the economic, climate resilience, and food security impact of our program on farming families and generate reports for various stakeholder audiences.
  • Lead the creation of protocols and quality control systems for all major monitoring and evaluation systems, including capture of farmer contact information, phone surveys, and in field measurements with farmers.
  • Lead the training of Semilla Nueva, partner, and government staff on the use of Semilla Nueva monitoring systems and supervise their implementation.
  • Supervise data storage and accessibility.

• Academic and independent research studies
  • Co-develop studies with academic researchers to measure the nutritional and livelihood impact of Semilla Nueva’s programs on beneficiary families, including studies on biological impacts of biofortified grain, livelihood impact evaluations, and climate resilience studies.
  • Support the creation of third party ex-ante impact models and cost-effectiveness analyses. o Lead efforts to create a narrative and visualization on the impact of Semilla Nueva’s programs for donors, partners, and government to quantify and connect with the potential and impact of biofortified seeds.

• Management and Leadership
  • Develop and grow a professional team dedicated to the areas above.
  • This position will report to and collaborate closely with the Executive Director and will be included in the leadership team charged with organizational and strategic development, including leading writing of new strategic and operational plans.

Compensation

• Remote position
• Salary range: $100,000-140,000/yr depending on experience
• Competitive benefits package

Apply

To apply please send your CV to Trabajo@semillanueva.org with the subject, Director of Impact and Cost-Effectiveness and your last name. 

Feel free to send any recent publications and/or 2-3 bullet points of why you think you would be a good fit for the role and we may be a good fit for you. We also highly encourage you to read our most recent biannual report on our website before applying.