Senior Program Officer, Women’s Economic Empowerment – Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Application Deadline 20th May 2022

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, it focuses on improving people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, it seeks to ensure that all people—especially those with the fewest resources—have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life. Based in Seattle, Washington, the foundation is led by CEO Mark Suzman, under the direction of Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett.

Division Summary – Gender Equality (GE) Division

In 2020, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced the creation of a new division, Gender Equality, driven by our determined leadership and partnership to accelerate progress for women and girls globally. The past two years have seen an outstanding confluence of energy on this issue, and we have a greater understanding than ever before on the centrality of gender to all development outcomes embodied in the Sustainable Development Goals. Built to capitalize on the belief that we are at a pivotal point in history for gender equality, the division signals our intent to fully maximize our voice and our co-chair’s dedication to accelerate impact.

Women’s Economic Empowerment

Our team’s strategy is anchored around improving Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) through livelihoods interventions aimed at improving women’s ability to earn and control an income. The team has two pillars, one focusing on Women’s Livelihoods

Development (WLD) and the other on Gender Data and Evidence (D&E).

Our programmatic work in WLD is grounded in testing and learning by doing and then scaling interventions that help women to generate and control an income. The levers we are exploring in our strategy include access to productive resources, access to markets and addressing restrictive social norms. We actively seek platforms that can help scale our work, whether through women’s collectives, digital marketplaces, government policies or value chains. We are keenly interested in the role digital technology, public infrastructure and new business models can play in advancing the cause of women’s economic empowerment in ways that were previously not possible.

The pillar on research and data includes: a) evidence generation on “what works” to advise internal and external partners on evidence-based programming and policymaking for women’s livelihoods in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa; and b) overarching work on strengthening the global data architecture to address pervasive measurement and data gaps in gender-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and other key economic indicators, in partnership with country statistical systems and global institutions and organizations.

We are currently actively involved in delivering work in India, Nigeria and Uganda, and are seeking to expand our work into East Africa and other markets in South Asia in the coming year.

Leadership and Culture

Our culture shapes our choices about what we do and how we do it. We believe that energized people, working well together, fueled by great leadership in an inclusive environment can do extraordinary things. We expect foundation employees to intentionally and consistently embody our values of optimism, collaboration, rigor, innovation and inclusion.

Position Summary

The India Country Office (ICO) Senior Program Officer (SPO) for Women’s Economic Empowerment will focus on scaling impactful solutions that empower women and girls to earn and control incomes, thereby expanding their social and economic opportunities.  The SPO will create a strong portfolio of investments that further these goals by identifying key barriers and building a strong evidence base for informed decision-making by government, the private sector and other key influencers. The role will support the execution of the WEE strategy in India under the leadership of the Deputy Director (DD) of GE in the India office, building a portfolio of gender data and evidence and livelihoods interventions that support women’s economic empowerment.

Given the early stage of development of the Gender Equality division, they should have comfort working with ambiguity and in a start-up mode to deepen our internal and external programming work on gender equality.

This role will report to the ICO Deputy Director for Gender Equality, with a dotted line to the Deputy Director, Gender Data and Evidence.

Key Responsibilities

• Support and help coordinate the implementation of the foundation’s Women’s Economic Empowerment strategy in ways that avoid duplication and ensure alignment with priorities and needs of women and girls in India.
• Partner with governments, donors, the private sector and other critical partners to analyze and bring insights to bear on how to scale women’s economic opportunities through gender equitable platforms and programs.
• Work as an integral part of the India and global Women’s Economic Empowerment teams to build and handle a portfolio of investments on women’s empowerment and to strengthen gender data, evidence, and measurement to identify how best to use both public and private sector opportunities to achieve gender equality goals.
• Work with partners to develop frameworks for collecting results against the division’s results framework. Ensure that results and knowledge generated on projects are adequately recorded in our tracking systems and synthesized into wider lessons learned
• Working in partnership with the Data & Evidence team, look for ways to embed learning and evidence generation into the portfolio, actively capturing and sharing insights, innovations and lessons learned from our partners and helping drive the development of global public goods (e.g. reports, briefs, decks) that benefit the GE division, other teams in the foundation,  and external partners.
• In coordination with the DD-GE and senior leadership in the India Office, partner with other foundation teams working on gender outcomes through their program strategies (Agricultural Development, Financial Services for the Poor, WSH, Global Policy and Advocacy, etc.) to ensure the work we do represents (a) anchored coordination in-country; and (b) co-investments and work through relevant platforms to advance women’s empowerment goals.

Areas of focus to include:

Partner relationships: Cultivate high quality interactions and build and deepen networks among government ministries, donors, private sector partners and foundations, researchers, implementers, evaluators on gender equality including with national and sub-national officials, and bilateral, multilateral institutions.

Grant management:

Lead a portfolio of Women’s Economic Empowerment investments in India and provide inputs to global investments. Track and assess progress and ensure key project achievements (such as baselines, baseline analysis, project roll out, etc.) are done with a high degree of quality and with strong technical inputs and problem solving.  Draw out insights and findings and communicate results within the WEE team, the GE division,  and in the larger gender equality community.

Coordination, and learning: Within India, be an integral member of the Women’s Economic Empowerment country team and serve as an important point of contact on gender equality for internal foundation partners as well as grantees. Support the Deputy Director of Gender Equality and the Deputy Director of Policy Advocacy and Communications on high level leadership visits and/or other critical advocacy / voice initiatives requiring in-country inputs and engagement. Focus on getting evidence off the shelf by making it widely accessible, and applicable to local contexts, helping key partners adapt and adopt findings while exploring local barriers to scale-up of successful programs.

As a member of the Gender Equality Division, contribute to the overall team’s success, including attending and contributing to regular team and divisional activities. In addition, the SPO plays a meaningful role “acting as a bridge” between our India Country Office and other areas of work related to gender across the country.

Portfolio Development: The role will also involve the identification of new investments. You will identify and evaluate potential partners and grantees to co-develop and evolve ideas and initiatives, develop calls / RFPs and review letters of inquiry and grant proposals, while providing clear, concise and insightful written analyses and recommendations for funding. This includes drafting and editing proposal summaries and progress reports for existing grants for review by foundation leadership. Additionally, this may also require the management of internal processes to ensure that the portfolio of work on gender data progresses with appropriate documentation, grant budgeting and reporting.