Research Consultant

Senior Research and Evidence Consultant Prevail Fund is exploring a new area of giving, and this consultancy will help determine whether the evidence supports launching a new fund. We are looking for a Senior Research and Evidence Consultant to join us for roughly three months to review promising livelihoods interventions and the organizations delivering them. This is a rare opportunity to shape a major strategic decision for a potential new fund.

About Prevail Fund Prevail is a new foundation dedicated to pursuing bold goals. We set a social change goal, find philanthropists who have a similar vision, raise a pooled fund, and then make grants. Rather than choosing a general issue area (e.g., education), each pooled fund chooses a simple, targeted goal. For example, our first fund aims to improve foundational education for over 27.5 million Grade 1-3 children across 11 national governments in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Prevail provides patient capital to implementers – primarily in the form of grants that grow over time as our partner organizations scale. In addition to funding, Prevail offers on-the-ground support to help orgs scale, including strategic planning, systems, recruitment, and talent development. Our roots are in the field. Our Co-Founding Board members have a track record of scaling social enterprises that together employ more than 15,000 staff and manage annual budgets exceeding $500M.

In Our First Three Years, We Have

• Provided $55M in funding to date, to support 27 partners across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, growing very quickly
• Helped partners to strengthen foundational learning outcomes for over 3 million children
• Hired 35+ mission-driven team members
• Executed dozens of in-field projects to help support key functions for our implementing partners

About The Role You’ll work closely with the Claudia, Varsha and the research team to help build the evidence base and analysis behind Prevail’s scoping work, forming judgments on what works, what does not, and which interventions have the highest probability of success. The role is best suited to an experienced researcher who can translate evidence into practical decisions and wants their analysis to inform a real strategic choice. The core components of this role are to:

• Help frame the comparison. Work with the team to define the impact metric for comparing interventions on a like-for-like basis, and to build the evidence-levels framework for assessing how much weight each finding should carry.
• Review the evidence. For each of the ~20 organizations, review academic studies, evaluations, public materials, and third-party sources. Capture the headline findings, including cost per unit, impact size, and persistence, and assess how much confidence we should place in each study and why.
• Explain what works and why. For each intervention type, synthesize the evidence to identify how and why the model works, where it breaks down, and what this implies for Prevail’s decision on whether to launch a fund. Assess the strength of the evidence against the evidence-levels framework, and form a judgment on whether the overall evidence base and implementation landscape are sufficient to justify moving forward.
• Manage the cost-effectiveness model. Incorporate insights from the research into the cost-effectiveness model. Update the model as new evidence shifts assumptions or conclusions for a given intervention or organization.
• Help draft the decision memo. Contribute to the memo that will inform Prevail’s decision on whether to launch the fund. Work with the team to translate the evidence, cost-effectiveness analysis, and implementation landscape into a clear recommendation.

Who We’re Looking For We’re looking for someone technically strong, equally comfortable with a literature base and a dataset, who can move quickly across a wide field and turn a messy evidence base