Zahirul Islam

Senior Project Associate

Md. Zahirul Islam has over 13 years of experience in applied research, project management, monitoring and evaluation, data management, and statistical analysis, and is a Senior Project Associate at ARCED Foundation. He has coordinated and/or participated in over 100 national and international assignments, including randomized controlled trials, impact assessments, baseline, midline, and endline studies, feasibility studies, market studies, tracer studies, Program evaluations, and large-scale quantitative and qualitative surveys. His work covers areas of education, public health, environmental sustainability, climate change, livelihoods, social protection, labour markets, skills development, gender, humanitarian response, governance, agriculture, and the ready-made garment sector. He has worked with government, international development organisations, universities, research institutions, and non-governmental organisations, such as the World Bank, USAID, ILO, IFRC, Swisscontact, Oxfam, Save the Children, Stanford University, Georgetown University, New York University, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the University of California, San Diego.

He has professional experience in research design, sampling, questionnaire development, digital survey programming, recruitment and training of field teams, supervision of data collection, quality assurance, data cleaning, statistical analysis, preparation of dashboards, interpretation of findings, and technical report preparation. He is proficient in Stata, SPSS, R, basic Python, Power BI, Tableau, SurveyCTO, ODK, KoBoToolbox, ArcGIS, and QGIS, and has extensive experience in the development of high-frequency data checks, automated monitoring systems, and real-time dashboards. Mr. Islam is a Professional Master of Development Studies graduate from Jagannath University and also holds an MBA in HRM and has been professionally trained in reproducible research, research ethics, data science, research communication, and project management. He has a unique skill set that allows him to handle the large number of multidisciplinary studies he oversees while ensuring that they have high standards of research integrity, data quality, and practical policy relevance.