Health Economist

Duties and responsibilities

• Play the leading role in conducting economic analyses and providing evidence for the public health initiatives.
• Coordinate the studies for analysis of impact of user charges versus health insurance and its implications on health care utilization in facilities, with equity analysis focused on utilization by women, vulnerable groups and children for advocacy.
• Analyse the resource allocation pattern to the sector and suggest ways to enhance the value for money while also analysing the adequacy of the resource allocation, especially for drugs and maintenance.
• Provide project management support for various programs being implemented by the Ministry of Health and contribute to identifying bottlenecks and corrective steps to achieve the expected outcomes.
• Support the relevant ministry to build a business case for health including conducting cost effectiveness and/or cost-benefit analysis, modelling impact of investments on mortality, morbidity and health status as well as benefits outside the health sector including education, economic productivity, security etc.
• Support the strategic planning unit in conducting scenario modelling to visualize likely direction and magnitude of changes resulting from proposed reforms, reveal crucial trade-offs associated with choices and estimate the cost implications of reform initiatives.
• Take an active role in monitoring and evaluation of projects and provide feedback to the team on the progress of various components- the achievements and slow-moving areas. This would include updating the monitoring indicators of projects on a regular basis based on the project data and studies; preparing reports based on the information generated by projects for policy purposes as well as to strengthen the information collection methods on a regular basis.
• Provide periodical reports on the progress and status of all assigned tasks.

Required Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Bachelor’s degree in relevant field (Health Economics, Public Health, Public Policy, Statistics, or other Social Sciences)
• Minimum of 5 years’ experience in health sector and in health economics related reviews and analytical work at the National/State level.
• Master’s degree in Public Health
• Strong economic, statistical and econometric skills, including experience with detailed, high-level data analysis and sampling Sound communication and technical writing skills
• Good knowledge of the Nigerian and state health system and key health system actors.
• Possession of cognate experience in providing technical assistance to government at national or sub-national levels is an advantage
• Ability to initiate and see through policy reforms through collaborative, consensus building approaches, especially in the development space.
• Good interpersonal relationship skills
• Proven abilities to set priorities, multi-task, work and deliver independently with limited supervision.