The Global Growth & Opportunity (GGO) division works to catalyze sustainable transformative change in the face of inequities and market failures, to realize the potential of untapped markets, and to see the economic and social benefits of including everyone. We focus on the areas of Agricultural Development; Financial Services for the Poor; Water, Sanitation and Hygiene; and Gender Equality. We seek solutions that are sustainable, transformative, and inclusive with an eye toward applying technology innovations as well as data evidence to drive change in the world’s developing countries.
In the countries where we work, women and girls face differential barriers to their health and development because of the ways that poverty and inequality are interconnected.
Fundamentally, we believe that gender equality is a powerful means to lift poor households out of poverty. At the core of every problem the foundation is trying to solve, whether productivity or disease, the under-valued but powerful lives of women and girls are central to the solution. We recognize that our goals will be harder to achieve if half the world’s population is left behind, and unless we systematically address gender inequalities and meet the specific needs of women and girls. The Gender Equality (GE) team works toward that purpose by:
- Helping scale women’s economic collectives and group-based approaches that can deepen economic and empowerment outcomes for women and girls.
- Filling gender data and evidence gaps including gender bias in data measurement tools; secondary analysis on women’s economic empowerment, and evaluative work in country on ‘what works’ to improve women’s economic empowerment.
- Amplifying the impact of the foundation’s goals by helping program strategy teams apply a systematic gender lens to their work and target specific gender gaps through catalytic investment.
Focal countries include India, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania but we aim to work deeply in a set of countries while connecting those learnings back into global analysis and learning. As our work on women’s economic empowerment policies and programs is growing, including around work, barriers to work, and collective enterprise, we are seeking to fill a critical role on the Gender Equality team.
The primary responsibility of this limited-term Senior Program Officer (SPO) will be to:
- Build the Evidence Base to transform programs and policies by generating higher-quality evidence on women’s work (including women’s empowerment collectives), disseminating it broadly, and building a stronger research and evaluation field through both in-country and global work.
- Develop and strengthen a global initiative on women’s economic empowerment to use and pool data from multiple countries and data sets to advance foundational knowledge on barriers and enablers and use that evidence to shape thinking and action on policies and programs.
- Partner with other donors, governments, and foundation policy and advocacy staff to design efforts that help get evidence ‘off the shelf’ and used by governments, implementers, and foundation staff.
- Lead high quality research and analysis for the GE team’s Women’s Empower Collectives (WECs) work to deepen the quality, depth and breadth of evidence on WECs; including gaining a better understanding of cost effectiveness, significance, elements, and innovations in this space.
- Build the field of knowledge on women’s collectives, including leading an existing evaluation consortium around women’s groups, and partnering with other team members, to build out new efforts to advance knowledge and understanding on WECs.
- Coordinate insights and serve as a focal point across foundation investments to ensure that findings, and insights on both women’s work and on women’s collectives specifically, are captured, analyzed and the results fed back into GE strategic decision-making processes and team materials.
- Ensure that insights and findings from our work are used to drive and align foundation work.
- Lead evaluation and landscaping work to support new portfolios including exploration on less reached groups such as adolescents.
- Analyze insights coming in from grants and use data to question team hypotheses and support better decision making.
- Draft key documents, reports, and presentations for a variety of purposes and audiences, summarizing developments and recommendations for program areas and external partners.
- Contribute to the overall Gender Equality team’s success and support; including attending and contributing to regular team and divisional activities.
Core Responsibilities
This is a role that will appeal to a creative and high energy problem-solver dedicated to women’s economic empowerment. Someone whom can clearly communicate how data and evidence can be used to realize the vision of gender equality and encourage an open dialogue on evidence. As a collaborator and energizer, you will also be expected to lead investment management and development activities related to a portfolio of complex investments. This will include:
- Translate the Gender Equality WEE strategy into reality; participate in driving the strategy forward and updating the strategy when relevant.
- Partner identification, reviewing letters of inquiry and grant proposals; providing clear, concise and insightful written analyses and recommendations for funding, drafting, and editing proposal summaries and progress reports.
- Steering investments; including assessing progress, course correcting as needed, and documenting and sharing learnings.
- Building networks among researchers, statisticians, evaluators, and bilateral/multilateral institutions.
- Getting evidence off the shelf by making it widely accessible and applicable to local contexts, helping key stakeholders adapt and adopt evidence findings, and exploring local barriers to uptake.
- Partnering with colleagues from the foundation’s Global Policy and Advocacy team to ensure that policy makers and program advocates are informed with compelling evidence on what works for women’s economic empowerment.
We are looking for people who enjoy the opportunity of working on complex problems and collectively creating solutions that have the potential for transformative change in the lives of people around the world. You must be prepared to work across a diverse set of disciplines, bridging a wide range of expertise all the while being a team player, with a demonstrated ability to work with flexibility, efficiency and diplomacy in an exciting, challenging environment.
The responsibilities of this role require that you have deep technical expertise and experience with women’s economic empowerment policies and programming; ideally with women’s collectives in low and middle-income (LMIC) countries in either Africa or South Asia. You must also have strong comfort with policy and program research and evaluation.
Additionally, you should have:
- Proven ability to generate results in women’s economic empowerment policy and program work in LMIC settings.
- Experience with a variety of research methods to test policies and programs in LMIC settings.
- Recognized externally by the global professional community as an expert in women’s economic empowerment in LMIC settings, including for example, women’s work, barriers to work, women’s collective enterprises.
- Experience in setting an economic strategy, rationalizing investment, and operationalizing the strategy.
- Understanding of the global ecosystem of women’s economic empowerment stakeholders (e.g. anchor institutions, governments, researchers, think tanks, program implementors, etc.). East Africa knowledge is an asset.
- Excellent written, facilitation, and oral communications skills effective with a broad and diverse audience.
- Experience developing and managing strong partnerships and relationships.
- Ability to prioritize work based on minimal direction and multiple competing priorities. Be highly organized and work with efficiency.
- Ability to multi-task and set priorities in an efficient and self-managed, self-motivated manner.
- This role is an individual contributor; not a people manager. It requires demonstrated ability to work in a complex environment and small team to develop and successfully design, develop, and deliver a portfolio or work and implement a work plan to achieve established goals.
- Ability and willingness to question and challenge colleagues, including managers and partners, in a constructive, respectful, and open manner.
- Ability and comfort working in a matrixed environment.
- Ability to travel up to 25% domestically and internationally.
- A sense of humor.
- Commitment to the foundation’s core values, mission and programs with an approach that is consistent with the foundation’s guiding principles while holding oneself to the highest ethical standards.
Additional experiences that would be deemed an asset but are not required:
- Experience/knowledge of women’s empowerment collectives (savings groups, self-help groups, producer collectives, etc.).
- Experience in grant-making, portfolio design, delivering on grant or other investment approaches whether from philanthropy or international funding environment.
- Experience in using/testing digital tools and applications for driving women’s economic empowerment.
- Experience/comfort with economic modelling, cost-effectiveness.
- Experience in working with youth-oriented/group-based approaches (i.e. safe spaces or other collective models or efforts focused on the economic transitions of adolescent girls and young women).