Program Officer for Global funding at Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is seeking applications for the post of Program officer for global funding. This position requires residency in or relocation to Seattle, Washington.

Requisition Number: 2631BR

Foundation Overview: Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the 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. In the United States, it seeks to ensure that all people—especially those with the fewest resources—have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life. Based in Seattle, the foundation is led by CEO Jeff Raikes and co-chair William H. Gates Sr., under the direction of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.

Group Summary: The foundation’s Global Development Program is working with motivated partners to create opportunities for people to lift themselves out of poverty and hunger. Within this program, the Water, Sanitation & Hygiene (WSH) initiative focuses its efforts on supporting effective, sustainable and scalable ways to assist the 2.5 billion people who lack access to adequate sanitation. Poor sanitation causes diarrhea, the second leading cause of child-death in the developing world, taking over a million lives annually. We seek to catalyze action by others and to leverage the foundation’s particular capabilities, such as taking risks to drive innovation and engaging with a wide range of partners to achieve measurable results.

The WSH team has launched its new strategy in July 2011 under the banner “Let’s Reinvent the Toilet” and is developing an ambitious research and development program to turn this vision into a reality. This Science and Technology initiative has made a series of initial exploratory investments, including the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge and the sanitation Grand Challenge Exploration grants and aims to expand and build on these with the objective of making safe and affordable toilets available to many millions of low income consumers. We aim to shift the paradigm from one that focuses on using clean water to transport waste down an expensive pipe system to one that emphasizes resource recovery. We believe that modern science and technology, from chemical engineering to microbiology and biotechnology has a contribution to make that is largely unexplored. This position will play a key role in identifying and shaping S&T investment opportunities from basic research to product development. The team also funds innovative solutions that improve the servicing of the installed capacity of 2 billion latrines and septic tanks (emptying and processing of waste).

Responsibilities: The Program Officer (PO) will support the WSH team in making this vision a reality. The PO will:

Shape and manage grants to invent, develop, and roll out the reinvented toilet and improved sustainable sanitation services.
Provide landscaping and analytical input into the potential of innovations in sanitation-related science and technology.
Prepare background and presentation materials for brainstorming sessions related to our work.

The PO reports to a senior colleague with extensive developing country field experience in fecal sludge management and will work closely with the director and other team members. The PO is expected to bring direct lab and engineering experience relevant to our challenge of reinventing the toilet to the team.

Specific responsibilities will include:

Make and manage grants and partner relationships related to both Reinvent the Toilet and improved sustainable sanitation services initiatives, particularly latrine emptying and waste processing to recover resources.
Analyze and synthesize results from these grants, in order to sharpen the WSH team strategy and our ability to report on progress and value for money
Determine, with team leadership, priorities, objectives, scope, and preferred methodology to fund “reinvent the toilet” projects.
Develop partnerships with research institutions, industrial associates, development donors as well as sanitation service providers in developing countries.
Evaluate technologies from fields which traditionally have not been leveraged in developing-world sanitation for their potential to deliver what existing approaches have not.
Maintain an active role in the larger academic field of sanitation and waste management and function as an effective advocate for the development of the reinvented toilet, and improved sanitation services in general.
Research and rigorous scrutiny of data and discovery in the fields of sanitation, waste water treatment and waste management fields.

Qualifications:

Advanced degree in chemical engineering or a closely related discipline required; PhD strongly preferred.
Content area expertise in WSH desirable but expertise in related areas (chemical engineering, chemistry, physics, mechanical engineering) likely to be more immediately relevant to the role.
Ability to articulate ideas in writing and familiarity with standard software packages related to documentation, analysis and presentation.
Ability to work as part of a team with flexibility, efficiency, enthusiasm, and diplomacy both individually and as part of a complex program.
Interest and experience in upstream research with a practical engineering bent to turn lab results into products that work in the field.
Project management experience highly desirable.
A minimum of seven years experience working in applied research or engineering.
Strong communication and facilitation skills.
Several years professional experience in developing countries preferred.
Ability to travel up to 25% of time.

As part of our standard hiring process for new employees, employment with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be contingent upon successful completion of a comprehensive background check.

Further information: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/jobs/Pages/job-search.aspx

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