Job Opportunity for Senior Associate/Associate Manager, Product Management, End Ultra Poverty 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 End Ultra Poverty:

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 the 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. Despite the best efforts of large-scale government programs, the ultra-poor are still difficult to reach. Large government programs strive for breadth while the ultra-poor requires programming that strives for depth. Market solutions like MFI do not cater to the ultra-poor either.

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.

Graduation Approach is an evidence-rich program that targets women, graduates households out of ultra-poverty in a time-bound manner, and is multi-faceted. It targets the improvement of the agency of women, food security, income & savings, productive assets, and access to social protection and credit. A 10-year follow-up study of a six-country pilot revealed the long-term durability of the approach’s impact. Graduation Approach has now been adopted in more than 40 countries by NGOs and governments. 

The/Nudge Institute prototyped Graduation Approach in Jharkhand’s remote and left-wing extremism-hit districts with positive interim results despite two waves of COVID. We now work with the Union Ministry of Rural Development, Jharkhand’s Rural Livelihood Mission, and Govt of Karnataka to catalyze adoption by the government through policy advocacy, research, design, technical, and implementation support. We have also started implementation in Karnataka, particularly North Karnataka.  Read more here.

Position Overview:

We are looking for a dynamic professional to join us in this journey and own the research and program development. 

Key outcomes to be driven:

• adoption of the Graduation Approach in different geographical and cultural contexts
• build products centered on the Graduation Approach targeted at the ultra-poor 
• support the teams working with Government and NGOs to contextualize the graduation approach

At The/Nudge you will:

Research

• contribute to the research on the nature of and definition of ultra-poverty in multiple contexts of India
• drive research to study the outcomes of the graduation approach and its variations in India both internally and with external partners
• run thorough market and beneficiary research before the  program is launched in new locations 

Support implementation, monitoring & evaluation of the Graduation Approach 

• continuous research and evaluation to enable iterations and improvement of the design
• utilize M&E frameworks and systems to improve tracking, analysis, and decision making 

Product Design 

• designs that address key impact and scale barriers of the ecosystem
• livelihood contextualized for multiple target audiences and socio-economic situations
• implement tech solutions that improve the effectiveness and efficiency of graduation approach components with the help of the technology team  

Apply if you have:

• graduate, post-graduate degrees
• 2-4 years of work experience
• demonstrated growth mindset – learning continuously, improving, updating points of view and knowledge
• 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
• meaningful research/product/program management work
• willingness to travel in state and designated districts/block/panchayat as per the needs of the program’s goals
• written and spoken fluency in English

We aspire to be an inclusive and diverse organization and encourage qualified individuals irrespective of their religion, caste, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, or any other dimension of identity, to apply.