As the gender authority for the FSP team, the Senior Program Officer (SPO) will lead the team’s efforts to close the persistent gender gap in account ownership and usage globally. This work will build upon FSP’s core strategy and work with a focus on FSP’s eight priority countries (e.g. Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Kenya Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda).
Areas of Responsibility:
Make and manage investments that are intended to directly reduce the financial inclusion gender gap:
- Identify compelling use cases for women to open and use formal financial products and look for leverage points to scale up such payments. This can include digitizing payments (e.g. G2P) that are directed into women’s transaction accounts, along with other promising channels.
- Identify barriers to women’s effective use of financial services and products and craft investments to test approaches to overcome these barriers. Learn from these tests and other examples to refine the approach and scale-up effective strategies.
- Negotiate, implement, and oversee a small portfolio of investments on gender equality and financial inclusion; including high impact and complex partnerships, coalitions, and research consortia.
- Within a determined budget, provide funding for other FSP POs to invest to directly reduce the gender gap.
- Support FSP PAC team to identify synergies and potential opportunities for advocacy and communications on women’s financial inclusion using the foundation’s voice and platforms.
Make and manage investments that amplify WEE impacts from the use of financial products:
- Collaborate with the FSP research specialist on research to understand the mechanisms through which financial products advance WEE outcomes for low-income women.
- Leverage this research to test design elements of DFS products and services that will amplify WEE outcomes. Learn from these tests and other examples to refine the approach and scale-up successful design elements.
Together with the GE team, support the FSP team in its efforts to mainstream a gender lens across its investment-making, by supporting the FSP team with:
- Capacity and tools to apply a gender lens to their work.
- Partner with FSP leadership team to advance a program on gender-equitable leadership.
- Providing technical input on gender-intentional and transformative solutions, including technical review of grants on women’s financial inclusion; clear, concise and insightful written analyses and recommendations; supporting impact measurement on select investments.
- Support key partners to develop gender strategies and expertise; and to mainstream a gender lens in their own work.
Additional responsibilities will include:
- Represent the foundation to external constituencies. This could include formal and informal presentations, attending conferences, sitting on working groups, and holding board seats.
- Write and produce briefings, reports, email updates, and other materials on women’s financial inclusion for foundation leadership.
- Serve as a point of contact on women’s financial inclusion issues for internal and external partners, working within the complex matrix-style organization across GE and FSP.
- Provide support for, and interact with, the community of fintech companies and commercial service providers; including non-profit organizations and microfinance providers who will ultimately deliver financial services to low-income Bangladeshis.
- Monitor and share key insights from the work done in Bangladesh to facilitate work in other countries, especially countries that are a focus for the foundation.
Educational Background:
We seek an advanced degree; preferably in public policy, international relations, development or a related field coupled
Skills/Experience:
We are looking for people who enjoy solving complex problems using a hypothesis and data-drive approach and are experienced delivering innovative solutions in complex environments. You should be prepared to work across a diverse set of disciplines, bridging a wide range of expertise all the while being a teammate, with a proven ability to work with flexibility, efficiency and diplomacy in an exciting, challenging environment. We seek a recognized global professional with deep gender expertise and a knowledge of financial services.
Additionally, we seek:
- Expertise in gender analysis coupled with a capability to communicate clearly to others how to take a gender-intentional approach to address a variety of challenges within the financial services sector.
- Understanding of the key issues driving the gender gap in the usage of digital products among our target populations; including digital financial products.
- Proficiency to analyze a vast range of research and real-world implementations of financial services, synthesize them into a set of testable hypotheses around ways to improve outcomes, and collaborate with partners to craft grants to test these hypotheses and refine approaches based on feedback.
- Understanding and practical background in gender mainstreaming / gender integration within large program teams and operational settings.
- Knowledge and experience in DFS and digital payment systems. Knowledge of policies required to successfully target digital payments to low-income women.
- Superb strategic thinker and strategy development experience; skilled in breaking a development problem down into its constituent parts and prioritize bottlenecks.
- Strong capacity in systems thinking, structured problem solving and strategic business planning, with the ability to synthesize disparate information and critically analyze development challenges.
- Field based experience understanding the practical challenges women face in low-income settings.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills, ability to effectively synthesize information to reach diverse audiences and create consensus.
- Demonstrated ability to question and challenge colleagues in a constructive manner.
- Commitment to collective success and experience and comfort working within highly matrixed teams and projects.
- Excellent partnership building and stakeholder-management skills and judgement. Ability to define connections across different sector teams and parlay those into key measures of progress.
- 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.
- Ability to travel up to 30% domestically and internationally
- 12+ years leading teams or initiatives in financial inclusion or development (preferably with a mix of service in either the public or non-profit sectors).
Job Function:
Organization Info
Listing Stats
Post Date:
Sep 23 2019
Active Until:
Oct 23 2019
Hiring Organization:
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
industry:
Nonprofit