Job Description:
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.
The four key characteristics of any high-performing organisation are (a) measuring outcomes through reliable, high quality data that enables goal setting and monitoring progress towards these goals; (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 is based on evidence and cost-effectiveness; (d) and creating efficient systems to leverage external actors (including for-profit and nonprofit organisations). The Indian State needs to perform better on all four fronts above, by enhancing its capacity. CEGIS partners with states to improve this capacity by focusing on these four pillars of the State.
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. This vision and Theory of Change (ToC) is an outcome of extensive research done by Prof. Karthik Muralidharan (CEGIS Co-Founder and Scientific Director) and strategic philanthropic support provided by Mr. Ashish Dhawan (CEGIS Co-Founder).
Prof. Karthik Muralidharan is the Tata Chancellors Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. Over the past two decades, he has led extensive research projects in India across education, health, and social welfare. His book, Accelerating Indias Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance, systematically analyses Indias governance challenges and provides actionable, evidence-based strategies, emphasising state-level reforms as critical for Indias advancement.
Ashish Dhawan is a leading Indian philanthropist and the Founder-CEO of The Convergence Foundation (TCF). He is also the Founding Chairperson of Ashoka University and the Central Square Foundation, and is a governing board member of the Gates Foundation. Before his second career as a philanthropist, Ashish was among Indias most successful private equity investors.
CEGIS Approach and Model of Functioning
Our solutions to enhance governance are co-created with state governments in a state-led way, where we focus on deep partnerships with states with 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 a few other priority line departments.
In alignment with our four principles or pillars of change - outcome measurement, personnel management, strategic public finance, states and markets, CEGIS is currently working with the governments of Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, NCT of Delhi, Assam, and a few Government of India entities like the NITI Aayog and Capacity Building Commission (CBC) across a range of projects and sectors. Through CEGIS flagship offering, the KPI (Key Performance Indicators) Survey, we are helping enable state governments we are working with to collect better quality citizen level data, make informed, evidence-based decisions, and institutionalise this process of securing periodic citizen-level feedback. We are setting up a Financial Analytics Unit (FAU) to enhance analytical capacity and increase the effectiveness of budgetary allocations of the Finance Department in another state. In alignment with our personnel management workstream, we are also working with the HR/Administrative Reforms & Training Department to set up and institutionalise an in-house Capacity Building Unit (CBU) that aids the adoption of competency-based Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Performance Management Systems (PMS) with a few of these entities. Similarly, to improve the value of public money, we are working at the interface of states and markets which encompasses procurement, regulation, and policy formulation. Our solutions are constantly being refined based on real-time feedback and are designed to be customised and replicated across contexts.
CEGIS@5: A Journey of Learning & Building Capacity
Since its incorporation in 2019, despite the enormous challenges posed by COVID, CEGIS has gained significant momentum in building strong collaborations with the 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 2 state government engagements in the first 2 years of its inception, today CEGIS is working across several Indian states with 15+ projects across several sectors, including education, nutrition and local governance. From a small group of founding members, we have grown by leaps and bounds to become a team of 150+ members located across the country. Helmed by a former bureaucrat with invaluable governance experience, state and solution team leads with decades of domain expertise, and enabling functions led by professionals with considerable corporate careers, the team at CEGIS brings together knowledge and experience that spans various sectors - from developmental economics, research, and governance to management consulting and social entrepreneurship.
Over the last 5 years, we have also been able to garner support for our vision and theory of change from a diverse range of foundations and philanthropists whose partnership has enabled us to build our own organisational capacity as well as continue to experiment and improve our solution design to augment state capacity and governance. We believe that this approach will gradually enable all government officials to achieve their goals more effectively, thereby improving the ability of the State to deliver services to all Indian citizens in the decades to come.
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.
(Overview of the Team & Role - Other Sections follow)
The partnerships function at CEGIS is a direct outcome of the partnerships first approach and an ethos of treating partners as our customers and a potential conduit to taking our solutions to government partners often beyond our direct reach . This is housed as part of an integrated communications - donor management/ fundraising and partnerships team .
This role will report into the Head - communications and strategic partnerships who oversees all the functions mentioned above and will be responsible for active advocacy and outreach amongst partners especially those focussed on the education and nutrition sectors to start with and then broadbasing to other sectors .
This will involve working closely with the solutions teams as well as the state teams ot articulate clearly the value that CEGIS brings and the role in can play in enhancing the governance ecosystem.
- To know more about the work of the outcome measurement team, please see this video.
- To know more about the work of the strategic public finance team, please see this video.
- To know more about the work of the personnel management team, please see this video.
- To know more about the work of the State and markets team, please see this video.
Interested candidates are requested to submit their application here.
Pre-reads for the application process:
Please go through the following materials before sending in your application:
- Concept note on CEGIS
- A glimpse into life at CEGIS - CEGIS Retreat 2024
- CEGIS Snapshot 2023-24
- Podcast episodes with Prof. Karthik Muralidharan one each on education and healthcare in India.
- You are also encouraged to read more of Prof. Karthik Muralidharans work here and through his book Accelerating Indias Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Indias Development.
Position: Senior programme associate, Strategic Partnerships
Location: The role is location agnostic (though being based in one of the cities we have a presence would be a definite advantage) but would require frequent travel to meet partners as well as potentially work on organising events .
Position Summary: this role would serve as the nodal point for all partnership outreach on education and nutrition This would entail liaising with state teams , sectoral teams and the solution teams to distill our value proposition as well as mapping the education and nutrition ecosystem and understanding the gaps in the market. It would involve active outreach to partners, attending sector specific events in education and nutrition and serve as a repository of all that is happening in the external world in these two sectors
Role and Responsibilities
- mapping out the education and nutrition ecosystem in India - sector orgs, academic experts and other orgs and staying abreast of latest changes
- identifying opportunities for CEGIS to communicate its value proposition and solutioning in the education and nutrition space thereby increasing recall value in the ecosystem. This could be via joint knowledge creation, events, convenings, publishing etc
- Understanding our work in the education and nutrition space , the link between our solutions and the sector and articulating the same clearly to current and potential partners
- Working with the donor / fundraising teams to manage donors specific to this space . Advocate actively for new funding in this space
- Understand how partnerships can be stitched together for maximum impact , work on governance and joint reporting of the same . engineer specific partnerships in the state we work in by supporting the sector teams on the same
- Manage all documentation and reporting on partnerships in the education and nutrition sectors and others as needed
- Continuously work on expanding our partner list to include academic entities, subject matter experts and others who can drive solutioning
Education & experience
- Bachelors degree in any subject
- 3-4 years experience in either an education or nutrition focussed social impact org / funder focussed on education / nutrition
- Needs to have actively managed partnerships in past role
Skills
- Excellent communicator .. both written and oral communication
- Ability to design basic PPTs and articulate the narrative well
- Basic quantitative and research skills
- Excellent networker
- Reasonable gravitas to be able to articulate value proposition sometimes to senior audiences
Personal Characteristics and Desired Qualities
- excellent team player who is willing to stretch as needed
- self starter with high resilience
- ability to work in an atmosphere of ambiguity
- ability to handle multiple projects at the same time
Compensation Remuneration will be competitive with Indian academic, and think tank pay scales and will depend on the candidates experience levels.