This position can be based in a country where IPA has an office or in New York, NY or Washington, DC.

The Peace and Recovery Program (P&R) at Innovations for Poverty Action develops and carries out groundbreaking research and informs policy and programs that strengthen state capacities, reduce violence, build peace, or respond to public health emergencies, natural disasters, or human-made crises.

The initiative is broad by definition and covers topics that range from criminal justice, policing, crime, and organized crime / gangs, to violence reduction and peacebuilding, to responses to forced displacement.

funding projects through a competitive fund; providing technical assistance to research projects; and interacting with implementing partners and decision-makers to disseminate evidence and empower them to make use of emerging research.

Since P&R was founded in 2017, the program has supported over 50 research projects, and in great part because of this support, the number of rigorous impact evaluations within P&R’s thematic scope has increased significantly.

More than half of the studies P&R has supported are in forced displacement settings, and in order to respond to this demand for evidence, IPA in 2019 founded the Humanitarian and Forced Displacement Initiative (HFDI), which sits under the P&R program.

The Program is also currently expanding its footprint in Latin America and the Caribbean through research on organized crime and policing.

Chris Blattman and Betsy Levy Paluck serve as academic leads for the Peace and Recovery Program, while Jeannie Annan and Mushfiq Mobarak serve as academic leads for the Humanitarian and Forced Displacement Initiative.

The P&R program is funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO, formerly DFID) and the Open Society Foundations (OSF).

While in 2017-2020, the P&R Program focused on creating the evidence base, in the coming years many of the studies funded through the P&R program will publish their findings, and so the Peace and Recovery Program will have a unique opportunity to ensure that the findings inform policy and practice.

IPA’s vision is that the program will continue to grow in the next half decade, particularly by expanding its portfolio of research and policy engagements in forced displacement, peacebuilding, and organized crime.

For this next chapter of the P&R Program, IPA is seeking a talented manager, communicator, and fundraiser who will continue to grow the program, empower the Program’s staff, and communicate research findings to a broad audience.

Responsibilities

The P&R Director provides leadership and strategic guidance to the P&R Program, and to the Humanitarian and Forced Displacement Initiative.

managing a core team; and liaising with various support departments at IPA.

To be successful, the incoming program director will need to have strong fundraising, management, and communication abilities, and be a highly dynamic, analytical and driven individual who can build relationships and excel in a range of tasks from working with partners to identify research questions, to translating academic research into sensible policy recommendations.

Being successful in this role will also require the ability to develop strong professional networks with academic researchers in the fields of political science and economics, among others.

This will require the director to not only bridge the gap between practitioners and academics but also bridge multiple academic disciplines.

Core responsibilities include the following :

Qualifications