Job Openings Senior Program Manager - Nutrition

About the job Senior Program Manager - Nutrition

About CEGIS

Centre for Effective Governance of Indian States (CEGIS – pronounced See-Jis) aims to improve lives by helping Indian state governments deliver better development outcomes. We believe that the most impactful lever for accelerating national development is to improve governance and state capacity to better deliver core public services at scale.

Informed by cutting-edge research and evidence as well as a practical orientation toward implementable ideas, CEGIS works with state governments in India to enable a transformative improvement in their functioning. CEGISs vision and Theory of Change (ToC) are an outcome of extensive research done by Prof. Karthik Muralidharan (CEGIS Co-Founder and Scientific Director) and outlined in his multiple award-winning, national bestselling book Accelerating India's Development, and enabled by strategic philanthropic support provided by Ashish Dhawan (CEGIS Co-Founder).

CEGIS Approach and Model of Functioning:

CEGISs solutions to enhance governance are co-created with state governments in a state-led way, where we focus on deep partnerships with states using an iterative cycle of think-demonstrate-document-transfer. We work closely with the top bureaucratic leadership, front-line workers and public officials in Finance, Planning, Human Resources and priority line departments like education, health, and women and child development. Many of our solutions reflect ideas outlined in the book Accelerating India's Development, and these solutions are constantly refined based on real-time feedback and are designed to both be customized to the contexts we are working in, and to create templates that can provide the starting point for replication across contexts.

Our focus areas reflect evidence that key characteristics of high-performing organisations include (a) measuring outcomes through reliable, high quality data that enables goal setting and progress monitoring; (b) strategic use of personnel – competency based hiring and training, skilling, and performance appraisals to determine job assignments, pay, and promotions – to achieve the goals above; (c) strategic budgeting where resource allocation and revenue collection are based on evidence and cost-effectiveness; (d) and creating efficient systems to leverage external actors (including for-profit and nonprofit organisations). CEGIS partners with states to improve capacity by focusing on these pillars of State effectiveness, and aims to also integrate these horizontal governance improvements into integrated sectoral roadmaps to accelerate the achievement of state and national development outcomes.

Internally, CEGIS is organized into solutions teams that lead the design and technical quality control of our research and evidence-backed approaches to improving governance and state capacity; delivery" teams that lead state-facing work to contextualize the solutions, and support governments in implementing them; and enablement teams that enable the organization to function smoothly.

CEGIS@6 to CEGIS@10: Building on momentum to catalyse national development

Since its incorporation in 2019, CEGIS has gained significant momentum in building strong collaborations with state government(s) as a trusted partner who can provide both thought leadership and implementation support on key governance reforms. CEGIS position as a non-profit that does not take any funding from the government (other than in-kind contributions of office space/staff) has been a key enabler in earning this trust.

Beginning with 1 state government engagement in 2019, today CEGIS is working across 9 Indian states (Assam, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh). We also partner with union agencies/ministries such as Capacity Building Commission, Ministry of Women & Child Development (MoWCD), and Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation (MoSPI) to share insights from our state-level work to inform national-level guidelines and dissemination to other states. Finally, we also take on selected work at the district level to design and test implementation templates.

From a small group of founding members, we have grown to become a team of 150+ members located across the country, and expect to grow to over 200 in the coming year. Led by a former senior civil-servant with deep governance experience; state and solution team leads with decades of domain expertise; and enabling functions led by professionals with considerable corporate experience, the team at CEGIS brings together knowledge and experience that spans various sectors – from development economics, research, governance, management consulting, and social entrepreneurship.

Over the last 6 years, CEGIS has also garnered support for our vision and theory of change from several foundations and philanthropists whose partnership has enabled us to build our organisational capacity as well as continue to experiment and improve our solution design to augment state capacity and governance. With the rapidly growing demand for CEGISs offerings, CEGIS is well-positioned to play a key role in accelerating India's development.

To explore what the mission of CEGIS is and the impact we hope to have, please take a look at this video of our CEO, Dr Vijay Pingale.

About the Nutrition Team at CEGIS

Nutrition is one of the key areas of sectoral focus, where CEGIS aims to integrate solutions across outcome measurement, personnel management and strategic public finance to improve the nutritional outcomes for children.

Child undernutrition is a persistent problem in India, with 35.5% children under the age of 5 affected by stunting and 20% by wasting (NFHS-5). Despite the presence of large national programs aimed at addressing this problem, progress on reducing the prevalence of undernutrition has been slow. CEGIS aims to strengthen the state capacity of the department/ministry of Women and Child Development, focusing on the ICDS system, which is the primary government entity responsible for delivering interventions to improve nutritional outcomes for children. Through targeted interventions in data systems, personnel management, procurement, supply chain management and public finance, CEGIS facilitates accurate and prompt identification and subsequent timely treatment of undernourished children.

CEGIS works closely with the Government of Maharashtra to support improvements in governance and service delivery across priority social-sector outcomes —including health, nutrition, education, and gender.

Position Summary

As the Senior Program Manager (Nutrition) in Maharashtra, you will lead and drive the CEGIS engagement in the nutrition sector in Maharashtra. You will anchor the relationship with the WCD department and handle stakeholder engagement across the partnership ecosystem in the nutrition sector in the state. You will work closely with the vertical and sector leads to design and implement governance reforms across data, finance and HR in the nutrition sector. You will be ultimately responsible for the nutrition workstream and team in the state, and eventual success of CEGIS-driven reforms in the WCD department in the state.

This role will report to the Nutrition Lead. It will also require close collaboration with the state lead for government and partner relationships in Maharashtra, and the vertical leads for design and implementation of solutions.

Roles & Responsibilities

Drive the governance reform initiative in the nutrition sector with focus on solution design, MEL and knowledge management

  • Provide overall leadership to the nutrition team in Maharashtra.
  • Contextualise CEGIS nutrition strategy to Maharashtra by co-designing governance interventions with the vertical leads, bringing deep state context and technical sectoral expertise.
  • Execute, monitor and evaluate the interventions, design scaling strategies for successful interventions and embed solutions in government processes and state capacity building.
  • Define outcome pathways, intermediate metrics, monitoring and evaluation strategies for the engagement in Maharashtra; implement this with support from the MEL team.
  • Ensure knowledge management, clear reporting and documentation, and institutionalise learning in the Maharashtra nutrition projects.

Develop and maintain relationships with key government officials

  • Pitch CEGIS offerings and solutions in line with the nutrition strategy to state or district-level government stakeholders
  • Build and maintain relationships with relevant state officials across different levels, creating opportunities for team members to interact collaboratively with stakeholders and steer the engagement.

Manage partnerships, ecosystem engagement and funding narratives

  • Identify, institutionalise and manage partnerships, being the point of contact for communication with various stakeholders in the nutrition and ECD ecosystem in Maharashtra.
  • Position CEGIS as an important player in the state nutrition/ECD sector, building and regularly convening a coalition of partners working on these topics.
  • Participate in external events, workshops and conferences to advocate for CEGIS mission and establish mechanisms of cross-learning both internally and externally.
  • Support the nutrition lead in donor reporting and fundraising.

Required Qualifications, Skills and Abilities

Educational Qualifications and Professional Experience

  • Master's degree or equivalent in relevant fields - economics, public policy, public health, development studies or related quantitative or social science discipline.
  • 8 to 14 years of work experience with managerial responsibilities, demonstrating excellent project delivery skills.
  • Experience of working with government systems and bureaucrats at the district or state level, especially on topics related to nutrition, is highly desirable.

Domain, functional and behavioural competencies

  • Knowledge of the early childhood development sector, along with an understanding of the ICDS system.
  • Strong interest in improving the functioning of the government combined with interest/experience in using research and evidence to improve policy
  • Excellent problem-solving and strategic thinking skills, ability to analyse complex quantitative and qualitative data, craft possible solutions and recommend actions
  • Excellent writing and communication skills (ability to communicate complex ideas in a meaningful way and across different audiences) in both English and local language (preferred)
  • Demonstrated relationship-building ability and management of high-level relationships with partner organizations, ideally based on experience of working with Indian state governments
  • Ability to set goals and metrics for a team, and manage the team towards delivering those goals
  • Strong planning and organizational skills, and an ability to be able to set priorities, plan timelines and meet deadlines.
  • Operating style suited to working independently and in a small-organization setting, where teamwork and resourcefulness are highly valued.
  • Ability to work under pressure, handle competing priorities, maintain attention to detail, and deliver high-quality outputs.
  • Ability to think creatively, willingness to take risks to experiment with new ideas, and ability to turn ideas into action.
  • High ability to collaborate and actively listen to others, understanding and valuing others view.

Role Logistics

The role is based out of Mumbai. Frequent travel within the state and some travel to other states will be required. Fluency in regional languages is desirable, though not necessary.

Pre-reads

Please go through the following materials before sending in your application:

Recommended listening:

  • Karthik Muralidharan: India's Roadmap for Effective Governance — FED Dialogues: Podcast Episode.
  • Karthik Muralidharan on Making Governance More Effective — Sushasan | Podcast.

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