Job Opportunity for Associate Director, Head of Product, Ultra-poor at The Nudge Institute in Bengaluru

About The/Nudge:

The/Nudge is an action institute working towards a poverty-free India, within our lifetime. We partner with governments, markets, and civil society to build resilient livelihoods for all.  We are a collective of some of India’s best leaders and entrepreneurs from across the industry, academia, government, and development sectors, and our work is organized across three impact streams:

• Centre for Skill Development & Entrepreneurship (CSDE): exists to enable underprivileged youth to lead flourishing lives
• Centre for Rural Development (CRD): exists to enable families to come out of extreme poverty
• Centre for Social Innovation (CSI): exists to nudge top talent to solve India’s biggest challenges

About Ultra-poor:

While the top 5-10% of India is benefiting from a growing economy and is exposed to opportunities that are unprecedented in India’s history there is a bottom 5-10% in same India tucked away and invisible to the outside world on the edges of remote villages, geographically isolated, social and financially excluded, economically excluded and unable to meaningfully participate or gain from this growth of the country. We estimate that this population is 70-100 million people across India. The development sector refers to them as those living in ultra-poverty, the worst form of poverty trap which at one point was thought to be unbreakable.

Thankfully, the world has seen the development of a targeted, multi-faceted and sequenced model called the graduation approach which has demonstrated that ultra poverty can be conquered.

At The/Nudge we have been piloting this program for the past 2.5 years and are on our way to scale. Our purpose is ‘to help end ultra-poverty in India by 2030. Read more here.

Position overview:

We are looking for a Head of Product, Ultra-Poor Program to join us in this journey, and own the growth and scale of the graduation approach, in partnership with the government, donor organizations, research organizations, and others.

Key outcomes to be driven

• build products centered on graduation approach targeted at the ultra-poor that are scalable
• help scale the graduation approach program targeting the ultra-poor in partnership with governments
• set the vision for the products, articulate it and bring stakeholders (internal & external) and partnerships together to make the above a reality
• raise awareness about the program, to propagate the model across India and drive adoption
• help raise sufficient resources to fund this ambition

At The/Nudge you will:

Research

• Drive research to study the nature of and to define ultra-poverty in multiple contexts of India
• Drive research to unpack graduation approach and other designs targeting graduation approach so as to identify make the model cost-effective at scale
• Drive research to study the outcomes of graduation approach and its variations in India

Design scalable and cost-effective products that help the ecosystem adopt graduation approach target the ultra-poor

• Designs that address key impact and scale barriers of the ecosystem
• Livelihood products contextualized for multiple target audience and socio-economic situations
• L&D products enabled by technology to improve effectiveness of handholding
• Tech solutions that improve effectiveness and efficiency of graduation approach components
• Outcomes-based financial products that help propagate graduation approach
• Designs that make adoption by government easier and sustainable

Support implementation, monitoring & evaluation of graduation approach – own, partner organizations, or government

• Build product support systems to support successful implementations of the graduation approach
• Continuous research and evaluation to enable iterations and improvement of the design
• Build M&E frameworks and systems to improve tracking, analyses, and decision making 

Learning & Dissemination

• Research, study, and publish insights and opinion pieces on internal and external media
• Support efforts to make The/Nudge Institute a continuous learning organization
• Launch products & initiatives to enable continuous sharing and dissemination of insights of our own and that of other organizations to catalyze the ecosystem to scale the graduation approach

Apply if you have:

• graduate, post-graduate degrees
• 12-15 years of work experience.
• experience in leading zero-to-one initiatives
• experience in designing products, initiatives, multi-stakeholder programs and/or businesses
• experience in managing and supporting high-performance individuals
• experience as an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur – success or failure is immaterial. If you’ve failed, even better
• demonstrated growth mindset – learning continuously, improving, updating points of views & knowledge
• demonstrated success in starting and leading initiatives
• demonstrated ability to work under uncertainty, ability to articulate a vision, and secure buy-in from stakeholders
• excellent interpersonal skills and communication skills
• willingness to stay and travel in deep rural areas
• written and spoken fluency in Hindi and English