Director/Head - Program - NGO

Director, Head of Program, Asha Kiran at The Nudge Institute

Job Description:

Director, Head of Program, Asha Kiran

Bengaluru, Karnataka

Work Type: Full Time

About our Organisation

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.

Who are we solving for in Asha Kiran program?

The poorest households in India, especially the landless, marginal and small farmers, are heavily dependent on either seasonal agriculture or wage labor for their incomes. To supplement these sources of income and to diversify them are immediate and urgent needs. Livestock interventions are stable and diversified sources of income to such households especially when such interventions target higher agency of women.

However, while livestock rearing is quite prevalent it is still not perceived or acted upon as a growable income source. The mindset, infrastructure, value chain, products and services are not attuned towards increasing the income share of the farmers.

What are we solving for in Asha Kiran program?

Our work in Uttar Pradesh, through Asha Kiran, targets women in self-help groups and aims to increase their incomes through livestock interventions. We are partnered with Uttar Pradesh State Rural Livelihood Mission to scale goatery and backyard poultry farming to 2.5 lakh households. Our aims is to help scale interventions both upstream and downstream in partnership with the government and private sector.

What you will do?

We are looking for a Head of Program to help build prototypes and take the prototype to scale in partnership with the government and markets. We are looking for someone who brings a technology first mindset and good balance of markets and development thinking.

Key outcomes:

- Build strategy for the program and execute the vision

- Help raise resources, manage them and deliver impact at scale

- Build and scale products and services in goatery and backyard poultry targeted at increasing agency and profitability of women farmers

- Help scale such models in partnership with government and private sector

- Set the vision for the products, articulate it and bring stakeholders (internal & external) and partnerships together to make the above a reality

- Raise awareness about the program, to propagate the model across UP and drive adoption

Key responsibilities:

Strategy:

1. drive strategy and business planning to scale solutions for the poor

2. communicate strategy and vision to internal and external stakeholders

Collaboration:

1. Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to build the program and to execute vision

Research:

1. Drive research to study the target audience, their needs, aspirations, behaviors related to livestock rearing and their participation in the value chain

2. Drive research of the value chain itself to identify the incentives, challenges and profitability of stakeholders/participants in the value chain

3. Drive research on technical opportunities and challenges to drive innovation for or adopt them at scale

Design scalable products to increase profitability of women farmers:

1. Pilot promising designs with a sharp focus on outcomes, impact and cost-effectiveness

2. Partner to propagate scalable models and solutions

Drive operations and implementation of programs:

1. Manage operations team (production, market linkages) to deliver on goals

2. Build, motivate and coach teams to deliver goals

Set-up strong monitoring & evaluation systems - own, partner organizations or government:

1. Build product support systems to support successful implementations

2. Continuous research and evaluation to enable iterations and improvement of the design

3. Build M&E frameworks and systems to improve tracking, analyses and decision making

- Learning & dissemination

1. Research, study and publish insights and opinion pieces on internal and external media

2. Support efforts to make The/Nudge Institute a continuous learning organization

3. 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 livestock solutions

Who are we looking for in this role?

- 18+ years of work experience

- Experience in leading FMCG/Consumer Products, E-Commerce businesses

- Experience in designing products, initiatives, multi-stakeholder programs and/or businesses

- Experience in managing and supporting high performance individuals

- Experience in leading zero-to-one initiatives - as an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur

- Experience in building and nurturing strong and thriving partnerships

- Demonstrated growth mindset - learning continuously, improving, updating points of view & knowledge

- Demonstrated ability to work under uncertainty, ability to articulate a vision, and secure buy-in from stakeholders

- Willingness to stay and travel in deep rural areas - fluency in Hindi will be great