Senior Program Officer, Women’s Livelihoods Development at Gates Foundation, Ethiopia

Location: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Organization: Gates Foundation (GF)

Deadline: 11 July 2025

Job Description

The Foundation

We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities. As a workplace, we’re committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.

 

The Team

The Gender Equality (GE) Division’s mission it to ensure women and girls in Africa and South Asia can enjoy good health, make their own choices, earn their own money, and be leaders in their societies. When women and girls have an equal chance to thrive and lead, everyone benefits.

The Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) team’s strategy is anchored on testing and scaling interventions to improve women’s ability to earn and control income.

As a new and growing team, we partner and fund initiatives in India and sub-Saharan Africa to expand women’s income generation through two core levers: 1) improved access to capital, and 2) connection of women to profitable marketplaces, while leveraging and building increased availability of sex-disaggregated economic data for decision-making, as well as livelihood platforms and digital drivers for scale. The team includes groups that are focused on Women’s Livelihoods Development (WLD) programming and Data and Evidence (D&E) generation.

 

Your Role

The Senior Program Officer, Women’s Livelihoods Development, Ethiopia, will play an important technical role in the foundation’s evolving work on WLD. You will be responsible for building out the foundation’s work across the WEE program investment strategy across focus countries in East Africa –  including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia, working in close partnership with other teams including the Ethiopia Country Office, Africa Regional Office, Kenya Country Office, GE Division, Inclusive Financial Services, Agricultural Development, D&E, Policy, Advocacy and Communications (PAC), and Strategic Investment Fund. Given the early stage of development of the GE Division and WEE strategy, you should have comfort working with ambiguity and in a start-up mode to deepen our internal and external programming work on gender equality.

The postholder’s primary responsibility is to strategically develop and manage a portfolio of investments (grants and contracts) within the WEE team, focused on gender transformative programs supporting low-income women’s livelihoods, with a strong focus on the development of the early-stage portfolio in Ethiopia.

The postholder will be based in Addis Ababa, and report to the Director, Economic Opportunity, Africa, in close collaboration with the Deputy Director, WLD.

 

What You’ll Do

• Partner with foundation colleagues and external collaborators to develop, implement and assess the vision and Theory of Change of the WEE portfolio. Advance a forward-looking strategy with clear impact pathways for WEE and the GE Division that supports WLD and economic opportunity, playing a collaborative role with other teams in Ethiopia, including the health team.
• Build and manage a portfolio of WLD investments against the full WEE strategy for capital and markets with global and in-country partners focused on Ethiopia, with support to investments, learning and representation across Sub-Saharan Africa. Ensure that investments achieve their outcomes, making course corrections and adjustments as needed, to ensure success across WEE focal areas of women’s access to capital and markets, enabled through digital tools, platforms, and data, with connection points with GE Division women’s health and other GE programming.
• Develop investable concepts and grant proposals, collaborating with WEE and GE colleagues to provide clear, concise, and insightful written analyses and recommendations for funding with strong emphasis on leverage, building on WEE comparative advantages and building evidence of impact.
• Be a thought partner with grantees and ecosystem stakeholders – in Ethiopia and elsewhere in the continent – on the design of new partnerships supporting WLD, building out initial ideas into strong partnerships, leverage and systems change approaches.
• Support cross-learning, evidence generation and collaboration among foundation grantees, partners, and other funders where possible, with a strong focus on gendered data and gender transformational approaches.
• Work with partners to develop frameworks for collecting results against the division’s results framework. Ensure that results and knowledge generated on projects are adequately recorded in our tracking systems and synthesized into wider lessons learned.
• Working in partnership with the D&E team, look for ways to embed learning and evidence generation into your portfolio. You will creatively gather and share insights, innovations and lessons learned from our partners and help drive the development of global public goods (e.g., reports, briefs, decks) that benefit the GE Division, other teams in the foundation and external partners.
• Work closely with the Health and PAC teams to identify relevant policy opportunities and needs in-country, and get evidence ‘off the shelf’ by making it widely accessible, and applicable to local contexts. Provide technical leadership to help partners understand and adapt findings. Engage in active representation of WEE strategy and results both internal and external to the Foundation.
• Other special projects as assigned.

 

Your Experience

• Master’s or other advanced degree in a related field (e.g., development economics, finance, public policy, business), with a minimum of 7-10 years of relevant senior level experience, with on the ground experience in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on Ethiopia preferred.
• Significant technical expertise and hands-on experience related to the design and delivery of high impact women’s livelihoods programming, including women’s access to appropriate financial products, markets, and digitally enabled services to low-income populations in emerging markets.
• Experience working with partners in low and middle-income countries to implement change.
• Experience in service delivery through private sector institutions, civil society and government programming is preferred.
• Demonstrated experience with programming related to gender equality and WEE.
• Deep experience in financial services development and delivery relevant to women, ideally at both wholesale and retail levels.
• Experience with market systems approaches to livelihood development, particularly focused on the informal sector, including nano, micro and small enterprises.
• Experience with the use of data-driven interventions and digital solutions development, delivery, and use of data to understand impact and cost effectiveness of investments.
• Understanding of regulatory frameworks that pertain to women’s livelihoods, market development and financial services is preferred.
• Ability to work on complex, ambitious problems and collectively build solutions working across partners from a diverse set of disciplines and geographies.
• Excellent written, facilitation and oral communications skills to produce and share evidence-based materials and recommendations clearly and quickly.
• Ability to work effectively within a matrix team environment and to actively support the work and development of matrix team members.
• Ability to build bridges and trust with many different partners, including internally at the foundation and diverse external partners (e.g. community leaders, governments, multilaterals, private sector).
• Effective as a collaborator in complex internal and external organizations, including the ability to work with efficiency and tact in a matrixed environment.
• Demonstrated initiative and ability to multi-task and resolve unstructured problems with little oversight, creativity, high energy, and a positive demeanor.
• Proficiency in English, and ideally other languages spoken in the region.

Other Attributes

• Comfortable in a wide range of cultural, geographic and operational situations, demonstrating culturally sensitive behaviour with a diverse range of people and a deep commitment to development issues and high standards of personal integrity.
• Ability to travel up to 40% internationally.

Application deadline: 11 July 2025

 

Hiring Requirements

As part of our standard hiring process for new employees, employment will be contingent upon successful completion of a background check.

Candidate Accommodations

If you require assistance due to a disability in the application or recruitment process, please submit a request here.

 

Inclusion Statement

We are dedicated to the belief that all lives have equal value. We strive for a global and cultural workplace that supports ever greater diversity, equity, and inclusion — of voices, ideas, and approaches — and we support this diversity through all our employment practices.

All applicants and employees who are drawn to serve our mission will enjoy equality of opportunity and fair treatment without regard to race, color, age, religion, pregnancy, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, and prior protected activity.

 

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