Job Openings Program Manager - Nutrition

About the job 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.

Position Summary

The Program Manager (Nutrition) will play a crucial role in designing and delivering governance reform projects at the intersection of outcome measurement and strategic public finance at CEGIS. Working closely with the Leads of OM, SPF and Nutrition sector, the role spans the project lifecycle including developing concept notes, conducting diagnostics and secondary research, designing solutions and developing pilots and supporting their implementation and scale-up. The position is highly intersectional between outcome measurement and strategic public finance, requiring an interdisciplinary mindset and experience in working across the two streams. They will create high quality knowledge products, analytical reports and project documentation.

Roles & Responsibilities

Data Collection and Analysis:

  • Provides appropriate templates for gathering and quality controlling administrative data from relevant government line departments and finance/planning departments.
  • Manages all primary, secondary, and administrative data by following data management and security protocols.
  • Analyzes complex datasets and evaluates data quality across different types of datasets using statistical software and analytical tools
  • Integrates analysis and generates cross-cutting insights across operational, outcome and finance data.
  • Creates visual representations of data to enhance understanding and prepares outputs such as reports, briefs, dashboards.

Research, Diagnosis and Solutioning

  • Conducts independent research including secondary research and on-field research, diagnostics and root cause analysis to identify key system and implementation challenges.
  • Translates analysis into clear insights and recommendations to inform problem-solving and policy decisions.
  • Creates high-quality knowledge products and concept notes on integration of OM and SPF principles and practical toolkits to implement them.

Collaboration, Communication and Project Management:

  • Collaborates across internal teams for solution development, bringing together solutions with a sectoral lens.
  • Collaborates with project delivery teams and stakeholders to ensure alignment of diagnostic, analysis and implementation plans to technical thinking of OM and SPF.
  • Communicates project updates, findings, and recommendations to internal and external stakeholders.
  • Supports the engagement with relevant stakeholders, including government officials and organisational partners.

Personal Development

  • Sets, assesses, and reports specific goals for self and remains receptive to feedback.
  • Owns learning and focuses on self-development by seeking opportunities for growth.
  • Demonstrates willingness to take up additional responsibilities and collaborate with team members based on project priorities.

Required Qualifications, Skills and Abilities

Educational Qualifications and Professional Experience

  • Master's degree or equivalent in relevant fields - economics, statistics, public policy, data science, finance or related quantitative or social science discipline.
  • 4 to 7 years of relevant experience, including quantitative analysis, administrative data handling, and/or program delivery roles. Experience of working with financial data is highly desirable.
  • Prior exposure to government systems and programs, and experience working in multi-stakeholder environments involving government departments, partners, and internal teams is desirable.

Domain competencies

  • Deep knowledge of at least 2 out of 3 - public finance, measurement techniques, or nutrition, along with an understanding of how data informs decision making in state government contexts.
  • Experience in data management and analysis using STATA, R or Python programming.

Functional Competencies

  • Strong research and analytical aptitude, with ability to analyze complex quantitative and qualitative data, and formulate solutions
  • Excellent problem-solving skills and strategic thinking skills.
  • Excellent writing and communication skills to communicate complex ideas effectively within and outside the organization.
  • Demonstrated relationship-building ability and management of high-level relationships with partner organizations, ideally based on experience of working with Indian state governments
  • Strong planning and organizational skills, ability to set priorities, plan timelines, and meet deadlines

Behavioural Competencies

  • Passion for improving the effectiveness of Indian States, and alignment with CEGISs theory of change/impact
  • Operating style suited to working independently and in a small-organization setting, where teamwork and resourcefulness are highly valued.
  • Demonstrates high ownership of solutions, projects and workstreams.
  • 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 in Hyderabad, Telangana. Travel to other states will be required. Fluency in Telugu is mandatory.

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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