Manager / Senior Manager, Program Management, Sanmati

About The/Nudge:

The/Nudge is an action institute building resilient livelihoods to alleviate poverty. We work with women, farmers, tribals, and youth on rural development, agriculture, skilling, and economic inclusion, along with 15+ central and state government partners.

Our economic inclusion journey for 25 million Indians has reached 10 states with $250M of government funding to cover 1.25M people. Our incubator, accelerator, and grand challenges have supported 200+ social entrepreneurs, including 17 Forbes 30 Under 30, 3 Earthshot Prize winners, 1 Time Magazine cover, and more.

Set up with support from 90+ eminent philanthropists, 40+ corporates, and 15+ foundations, including Gates, Mackenzie Scott, Vinod Khosla, Nandan Nilekani, Tata Trusts, Skoll, Meta, LinkedIn, HDFC, Mphasis, KPMG, and L'Oreal, we are contributing towards a poverty-free India, within our lifetime.

About the Program :

What are we solving for

Sanmati 2.0 is a gender action research program to enhance women's engagement in digital value chains. The learning objective is to identify effective models or strategies that address the barriers women face in digital connectivity to enhance women's engagement in digital value chains.

The program components include:

1. Landscaping of existing models in service of creating digital work and value chains for women

2. Experimentation & evidence-building

3. Scaling models with evidence & ecosystem enablement

Through this action research program, 15,000-20,000 women program participants will be impacted across selected geographies in India.

Who are we solving for

As the world moves toward technology-centred development, women continue to be largely left behind due to ingrained challenges. Gender inequality in digital technologies arises from unequal access, usage, and knowledge between men and women. To optimise women's access to and productive use of digital tools, it is essential to enable their participation in equitable, relevant, and safe digital value chains.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic surge in future of work platforms that provide new employment opportunities, particularly for those unable to participate in traditional, normative forms of employment. However, research highlights that many women, especially in patriarchal societies, face significant barriers to digital engagement. For instance, the study: Feeling Proud, Feeling Embarrassed: Experiences of Low-income Women with Crowd Work, found that women's smartphone usage was often monitored by male family members, limiting their ability to access digital work opportunities.

Overcoming these barriers requires designing inclusive digital ecosystems that address the specific challenges women face when engaging with technology.

As economies continue to digitise, digital value chains are expanding, creating new infrastructure and work opportunities. According to a UNICEF report, 90% of jobs today have a digital component, highlighting the vast potential for women's inclusion in the workforce.

In India, where 85% of the workforce is employed in the informal sector, technology platforms can introduce a degree of formality and enhance labor market transparency. If connectivity barriers can be addressed, digital value chains could become a powerful driver of economic and social inclusion for women.

However, women's adoption of digital products and services, across information access, finance, and health, remains low due to factors such as a lack of compelling use cases, trust deficits, and low confidence in digital ecosystems. Addressing these challenges and increasing women's participation in digital value chains can enhance data systems by reducing bias and fostering more inclusive infrastructure. In turn, this can improve adoption, usage, and agency for women, unlocking meaningful opportunities across the digital economy.

What will you do

The key responsibilities of Manager / Senior Manager, Sanmati (Gender Action Research) will include:

1. Support implementation and execution of the program:

• Develop and deploy selection frameworks for onboarding partners.
• Work closely with experiment partners (NGOs, social enterprises, platforms) to co-design, planning, implement, and iterate pilots aligned with Sanmati's learning and impact goals.
• Develop and deploy a results-based framework to track progress and impact of different models across program timeframes and ensure selected models maintain market integrity and promote well-being for the participant women

2. Liaison with the Government ministries and departments:

• Work closely with relevant central, state, and local government departments to facilitate adoption of Sanmati interventions by front-line cadres and administrative bodies.
• Support policy dialogue and technical engagement with government bodies to enable uptake of frameworks, guidelines, and pilots into official programs, advisories, or implementation pathways.
• Build and sustain strong working relationships with government officials and institutions to advance Sanmati's strategic objectives and enable long-term collaboration

3. Partner, donor and ecosystem engagement:

• Engage with donors to align on priorities, communicate progress and learnings from experiments, and support high-quality reporting.
• Act as a connective tissue across experiment partners, MLE partners, and donors to ensure coherence between implementation, evidence generation, and funding decisions

4. Communication, convenings for research and learning dissemination:

• Develop and deploy an action plan for leveraging existing knowledge of the ecosystem and identifying modes of disseminating learnings on a regular basis.
• Support in convenings and conferences planned for dialogues and learning dissemination

Who are we looking for in this role

• 10+ years of work experience doing diverse projects at think tanks, consulting, or strategy organisations with a strong component of government liaison and ecosystem engagement.
• Passion and hunger for solving big social problems at scale using technology and keen interest in advancements and applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for impact.
• Demonstrated ability to learn continuously and collaborate with stakeholders in multiple spaces of ambiguity (0 to 1 journey of idea development).
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively in contexts with long decision, turnaround and implementation cycles, requiring patience, persistence, and consistent pursuit of outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to go deep into problems in collaboration with partners and key voices in the domain.
• Comfortable with working from the Government offices (based in Delhi) .
• Written and spoken fluency in English. Other languages are a bonus.
• Willingness to travel as and when required.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills

What's in it for you

• Own your growth: An impact-led learning environment encourages Nudgesters to invest in their learning and capacity building needs through initiatives and policies, including L&D wallet, individual development plan and internal role change opportunities.
• Find your tribe: Our hiring philosophy emphasises intent, attitude, smarts and skills, in that order, to build a cohesive environment for Nudgesters. The organisation is committed to curating people-centric policies, enhancing how employees experience life at The/Nudge.
• Take big bets: Organisational initiatives are intended to facilitate Nudgesters with a view to the big picture, illustrated by our impact across 50000+ households, 15+ governments, 200+ social enterprises and Charcha: India's largest social sector convening forum.
• Make it happen: A product-based approach in an action-biased environment empowers Nudgesters to implement audacious plans. Driven to fail fast, we endeavour to optimise resources in favour of programs that align with our scale ambition.

You can learn more about what we do and how we do it through this deck.

We aspire to be an inclusive and diverse organization and encourage qualified individuals irrespective of their religion, caste, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, or any other dimension of identity, to apply.