About the Organization:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, it focuses on improving people's health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. The foundation makes grants in three program areas: global development, global health, and the United States. Its financial services for the poor program is focused on supporting new products, technologies, and business models to make safe, affordable financial services, particularly savings accounts, much more widely available in developing countries.
About the Job:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is looking for an Associate Program Officer. S/he will report to the senior program officer (SPO), research and innovation of the financial services for the poor (FSP) team. S/he will support the FSP leadership team with high quality analysis and decision analytics around key issues, making sure that new data from partners, grants, and projects is captured, analyzed, and the results fed back in to strategic decision making processes.
Tasks and Responsibilities:
- Capture data coming in from grants, contracts, and partners. Analyze data in excel as well as Stata, Matlab, or other programs. Use data to interrogate team hypotheses and support better decision making;
- Draft sections of key documents, reports, and presentations for a variety of purposes and audiences, summarizing developments and recommendations for program areas and external partners;
- Support the SPO, innovation and research in the shaping of the team MLE strategy. Help design and operationalize processes and systems which will feed data and analysis from grants and research back into key strategy and portfolio management decisions;
- Participate in the formulation of research strategy and identify key learning questions as well as new technologies, research techniques, partners and relationships that will serve the program's mission;
- Support the PO, MLE in operationalizing the MLE strategy by helping each team define and track key indicators of success and test hypotheses related to their strategy. Help develop and manage large scale data collection, research, and innovation projects that support the MLE work;
- Work as a member of the research and innovation team to analyze data and develop new pieces of analysis for external dissemination to influence the field of financial inclusion;
- Be a source of knowledge for the team through the analysis of policy, technology, and business model developments in the financial services industry sector, as they relate to financial inclusion for the poor.
Qualifications:
- Undergraduate degree and significant experience in top-tier consulting firm or similar. Master's degree in Economics, or related field highly desirable;
- Strong background in data analysis required. Statistical analysis skills highly desirable. Spatial/GIS analysis skills a plus;
- Experience or familiarity with field data collection, survey design, field experiments (i.e. RCTs), focus groups, and other research methods;
- Experience with mobile technology, mobile money, retail banking, and/or financial services, highly desirable;
- Experience in developing countries, particularly in Africa and South Asia a plus;
- Must have excellent writing, analytical, relations, and project management skills;
- Needs to be highly-organized and efficient, able to prioritize work based on minimal direction and multiple competing priorities.
Closing Date: 31 Oct 2012
How to Apply:
Apply Online
