User Researcher

Assignment Details 

• Remuneration:ZMW 2,150/day (ZMW 45,150/month). 
• Contract type: International self-employed contractor, six-month role; hoping to be extended annually up to three-years if funding becomes available.
• Contract length:  Initial contract until 14 December 2026, with possibility to extend subject to funding and performance.
• Location: PACRA House, Haile Selassie Ave, Longacres, Lusaka, Zambia.
• Roles: 1 x role available with immediate start.

About the Project 

The Patents and Company Registration Agency (PACRA) is undertaking a full-scale overhaul of Zambia’s Business Register to align with modern digital governance practices and enhance beneficial ownership transparency. 

Low compliance rates in previous disclosure efforts have highlighted the need for improved user experience, enhanced infrastructure and integrated workflows. Meanwhile, legacy systems prevent PACRA from updating data capture systems to support legislative and user-driven enhancements to systems. The modernisation process now underway aims to address these gaps by developing a company registry system that is efficient, scalable, and aligned with international standards. 

Open Ownership and PACRA are jointly partnering to deliver this registry modernisation project, with Open Ownership acting as the grantee receiving and distributing the funds and hiring staff. Developers will work directly from PACRA’s offices in close collaboration with existing IT staff, including the Director of ICT & Digital Transformation Manager. 

The first funded year of the project will see developers responsible for rebuilding PACRA’s core infrastructure and an initial set of five workflows on top of this - name clearance and reservation, company incorporation, beneficial ownership declaration, updates to associated person(s) info, as well data access via API. 

Open Ownership has an initial agreement to fund one year of this project. Together with PACRA, we are seeking additional funding in order to build out the remaining business registration processes and continue to iteratively improve PACRA’s digital services. 

As part of this project, we have built a digital team working in an agile environment to design and develop a new system to support business registration and compliance in Zambia. The User Researcher will be embedded in this team, working closely with the Digital Lead and developers to ensure the system is designed around the needs of the people who will use it.

Purpose of the contract

The User Researcher will be responsible for planning and conducting user research and usability testing throughout the development process, with a diverse set of user groups including PACRA internal staff, businesses making beneficial ownership declarations, company service providers, and data users from inside and outside government. Their insights will directly inform product decisions and help ensure the system is accessible, effective, and trusted by its users.

Scope of Work

User research and insight generation

• Planning and conducting user research activities throughout the product development cycle, including discovery research, usability testing, and evaluative testing of live and prototype features.
• Recruiting and managing relationships with research participants across multiple user groups: PACRA internal staff, businesses and company service providers making beneficial ownership declarations, and data users from inside and outside government.
• Synthesising research findings into clear, actionable insights and sharing these with the team in ways that inform sprint planning and product decisions.
• Maintaining a repository of user research findings to build institutional knowledge about user needs over time.
• Advocating for user needs within the team and helping the Digital Lead and developers understand how design and technical decisions affect users.

Usability testing of the developed system

• Designing and running structured usability tests on the system as it is developed, working with both internal PACRA users and external user groups.
• Identifying usability issues, barriers to adoption, and accessibility concerns, and feeding these back to the development team with sufficient context to act on them.
• Working iteratively with developers and the Digital Lead to test improvements and validate changes.
• Ensuring that testing covers the full range of end-user types and use cases, including lower-digital-literacy users and those accessing the system in varied connectivity environments.

Research operations and team collaboration

• Working within the team’s agile processes, contributing to sprint planning and retrospectives from a user research perspective.
• Supporting the Digital Lead with evidence to inform product strategy and stakeholder communications.
• Helping to establish lightweight research operations practices suited to the project’s scale and context.
• Capturing and sharing lessons learned from research activities throughout the project, contributing to Open Ownership’s broader evidence base on beneficial ownership transparency.

The candidate may also be asked to undertake other tasks from time to time as requested by the team.

Contractor Profile

We are looking for a Lusaka-based individual with direct, hands-on experience of conducting user research and usability testing in agile software development environments. You will be comfortable working at pace, adapting research methods to a product context, and communicating findings clearly to technical and non-technical colleagues alike.

Our ideal candidate would demonstrate a number of the following experience, skills and attributes:

• [Essential] Proven, first-hand experience conducting user research and usability testing within an agile development environment, demonstrated through concrete examples.
• [Essential] Experience recruiting and working with diverse user groups, including users with varying levels of digital literacy and from institutional as well as public-facing contexts.
• Familiarity with a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods (e.g. interviews, contextual enquiry, usability testing, surveys, card sorting) and the judgment to select appropriate methods for the question at hand.
• Experience translating research findings into formats that product teams can act on, including user stories, personas, journey maps, or usability reports.
• Ability to work closely with developers within a sprint-based workflow, contributing to and influencing product decisions throughout the development cycle.
• Experience working in a government or public sector context in Zambia is highly desirable, particularly working with institutional users or regulated processes.
• Strong interpersonal and skills, with the confidence to lead sessions with senior stakeholders and members of the public alike.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English; knowledge of local Zambian languages is a strong advantage.
• The ability to self-organise and manage multiple workstreams without close supervision.
• A practical, empathetic approach to research, with a genuine interest in understanding how different people interact with digital systems.

Application process 

In order to apply for this consultancy, please send a CV, a link to your GitHub / portfolio and a covering letter detailing your suitability for this specific role by midnight on 5 July (CAT) to recruitment@openownership.org. Please indicate “User Researcher” in the subject line for the position you are applying for. 

The selection process will consist of a panel interview w/c 13 July with all applications being reviewed against the Terms of Reference. If you do not hear back from us by then, this means we are not taking your application forward.

Please note that Open Ownership is fiscally sponsored by Global Impact. Fiscal sponsorship is a common mechanism in the non-profit sector, as it enables organisations to launch programmes without needing to complete the full process of establishing a legal entity. Global Impact is a US nonprofit (501c3), and its executive team and board of directors are shown here. Your contract will be with Global Impact on behalf of Open Ownership.