Job Opportunity for Senior Manager, Product – 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.

Position Overview:

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

Key outcomes:

• to build products centered on graduation approach targeted at the ultra-poor that are scalable
• to help scale the graduation approach program targeting the ultra poor in partnership with governments
• to set the vision for the products, articulate it and bring stakeholders (internal & external) and partnerships together to make the above a reality

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
• 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 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 graduation approach

Apply if you have:

• a graduate, post-graduate degrees
• 10 ~12 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
• 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

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.