Project Manager: Financial Access Initiative

TERMS OF REFERENCE:  Project Manager

  PROJECT         Financial Access Initiative      

The Wagner School of Public Service seeks a Project Manager with a Master’s degree and experience in a relevant field to support the Financial Access Initiative (the Initiative) recently launched with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Financial access, especially via microfinance, holds promise for reducing poverty on a mass scale.  As many as a billion poor households remain without quality financial services, though, and solutions will require further innovation, experimentation, and evaluation.  The Financial Access Initiative, a joint project of

Harvard

University

,

Yale University

,

New York

University, and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), has been formed as a research consortium focused on improving access to financial services for the world’s poor through research on innovation, regulation, and financial policy. 

The initiative is led by Jonathan Morduch, Professor of Public Policy and Economics, New York University; Dean Karlan, Assistant Professor of Economics, Yale University; and Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics, Harvard University with Christina Barrineau as the Managing Director.  Together with IPA, the Financial Access Initiative counts among its members experts in development economics, psychology, and behavioral economics, along with a team of more than 20 staff members based in our university offices in the US and our field projects in the Philippines, Ghana, Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, and India.

The Financial Access Initiative is in the process of developing a range of innovations in the delivery of financial services for the poor and testing each innovation with randomized controlled trials to rigorously determine which strategies work effectively and why they work.  The goal is to better understand the financial needs of poor households, with an eye to generating effective interventions that can be scaled and replicated throughout the world.  Key topics for fieldwork include the nature of demand for financial services; the extent of impacts of financial access on incomes, businesses, and broader aspects of well being; and mechanisms that can increase impact and scale. 

THE ROLE

            

The Project Manager will play a crucial role as the primary support to the Managing Director to build the vision, strategy and administrative structures to achieve the following major objectives of the Initiative:

1. Systematizing and communicating knowledge: Conceptualizing issues, cataloguing major work to date, assessing evidence, identifying knowledge gaps, detailing issues in moving forward, communicating lessons learned; and
2. Generating new evidence

The Project Manager will have the following specific duties:

·         Provide primary support to the Managing Director.

·         Assist the implementation of the communication strategy, including assisting in research, preparation and distribution of Focus Notes, newsletter and other key documents, providing assistance in planning and organization of events, website, and reaching out to media and academic journals.  Oversees management of contact database.

·         Support the Managing Director in managing an Advisors Group of high-level experts that will play an essential dual role: first, helping to vet and to articulate the agenda for the target audiences of policymakers, donors and practitioners and, second, aiding in diffusing of the knowledge as it is created.

·         Undertake a leading role in engaging student involvement at NYU, Harvard and Yale through their microfinance clubs and other relevant departments.  In addition, assist in building a network of students at academic institutions and universities in developing countries.

·         Support relationships with partner organizations, core funders, and other key parties provides oversight on required documents and clearances, and ensures necessary logistical arrangements for related meetings; participates and documents therein.

·         Support field implementation of Financial Access Initiative activities globally by obtaining and documenting the Initiative’s activities; oversee a computerized matrix to track activities and the required FAI follow up actions.

·         Provide financial management support to the Financial Access Initiative: managing budgets, tracking the financial status in accordance with procedures and rules; assist the Managing Director on funding availability and needs; updating the relevant financial support information into the various briefs.

·         Oversee the TORs, awards contracts to the retained consultants and staff, and ensure the appropriate settlement thereof, in accordance with guidelines; and assists in performance reviews.

·         Oversee proper management of records of Financial Access Initiative projects covered by reviewing, evaluating and archiving documents and records.

·         Participate, as requested, in management meetings of relevance concerning the Financial Access Initiative, and ensures the necessary documentation and follow-up on decisions taken.

·         Draft correspondence for the various actions as required, and undertakes other administrative responsibilities, as may be assigned or needed.

Qualifications Required

·         A masters degree in public administration or business management;

·         Strong writing abilities in English

·         Strong administrative and organizational skills;

·         Strong database management skills;

·         Strong communication and advocacy skills;

·         Experience working in microfinance;

·         Some experience in organizing and coordination promotional activities and events; and

·         Competency in French and/or Spanish an asset.

The position will be based in

New York

at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

Email resumes to: contact.fai@nyu.edu