Director of Policy & Partnerships, BRAC UPGI

About the Opportunity

TheBRAC Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative (UPGI) seeks to hire a Director of Policy & Partnerships, the inaugural person to fill this position. This new Director will join three filled Director positions: Director of Country Portfolio, Director of Monitoring Evidence and Learning, and the Director of People & Operations. Under the leadership of the Managing Director, this Executive team of four Directors manages the strategy and operations of UPGI, a flagship program of BRAC International. As with all Director positions, the Director of Policy & Partnerships reports to the Managing Director.

This new position is a global role (and can be based anywhere), with preferences for one of BRAC International’s hubs in Washington DC, New York, London, the Hague, Nairobi, or Dhaka. The role requires extensive international travel.

The Graduation Approach has gained traction, but government deployments must become dramatically larger to address extreme poverty on a meaningful scale. UPGI aims to catalyze government programs that can reach at least 100,000 households per cohort with the goal of expanding its reach to an additional 4.6 million households in the next five years.

The Director of Policy & Partnerships will be responsible for developing and driving proactive UPGI global and regional policy change. This will be pursued with an engagement strategy with a wide range of global and regional stakeholders to ensure that institutions increasingly embrace Graduation and promote and finance large-scale Graduation programs at the country level. This Director role at a global and regional level will complement UPGI’s direct engagement in twelve countries led by UPGI’s country teams and partners and overseen by the Director of Country Portfolio.

The successful candidate will be a strategic thinker – with a strong understanding of global policy debates in international development. It would be advantageous to start with existing domain knowledge of poverty alleviation or social protection with policy change experience and relationships that could support UPGI’s mandate. The successful candidate will have the presence and expertise to represent UPGI externally. Priority stakeholders include the multilateral banks (e.g., World Bank), the UN, regional policy bodies (e.g., African Union), the research community (e.g., LSE), and partners and coalitions (e.g., Leadership Collaborative to End Ultra Poverty).

The Director of Policy & Partnerships will build from an already established foundation of advocacy and communications around Graduation, which have helped to ensure Graduation is a known tool to eradicate extreme poverty. In addition, the position will build upon and further enhance the reputation of BRAC, the pioneer of Graduation, an organization out of the Global South which has earned respect for its grounded, human-centered, evidence-driven approaches. In 2022, BRAC celebrates its first 50 years, and the Graduation approach celebrates its 20th anniversary. With a well funded next five years, it is an exciting time to join UPGI and BRAC International.

Primary Responsibilities

This Director position holds an explicit outward relationship orientation to position Graduation within and across various regional and global stakeholders. The role will come with a substantial budget and supervision of the Policy and Advocacy unit and staff, and it will have the scope to grow/evolve this leadership role to better support UPGI’s goals. The Director’s primary responsibilities include:

• Engagement and Influencing Strategy: Building on sophisticated analyses of the policy space, develop and implement a strategy to engage and influence a range of global and regional stakeholders to strengthen support for Graduation to scale in UPGI’s 12 target countries. Including:
  • Policy change: Identify entry points and policy change goals for advocacy targets to create an enabling environment that will catalyze the scaling of the Graduation approach. This includes advocating for changes within influential institutions and strategic policy forums.
  • Representation: Ensure that Graduation is well represented and BRAC is appropriately positioned within the wider global dialogue and priority setting. This includes ensuring effective representation by UPGI/BRAC at high-level fora and events, directly or through appropriate representation from others across the BRAC group.
  • Development of Public Goods: To envision, design, and create evidence-based public material such as briefs, policy papers, and other content that is relevant, accessible, and useful to critical audiences.
  • Convene and Collaborate on Regional and Global Events: lead in the vision and creation of global fora with partners to advance, share evidence, share know-how and accelerate Graduation among governments.
  • Global Partnerships**:** Establishing and managing high-level strategic partnerships, especially within and across multilateral development institutions.
• Catalyze Global Ambassadors: Working with a small group of high-level, influential Global Ambassadors for Graduation, curate policy maker engagements, develop briefing materials, arrange targeted travel and support Ambassadors’ advocacy on behalf of Graduation.
• Management & Leadership: as an integral member of the Executive Leadership Team, work to make all UPGI function at its best, including developing staff and units to work at their full potential. This includes supervision of the Policy and Advocacy Unit, and this supervision role may expand to other units in time. In addition, this role will prioritize staff development and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging.

Safeguarding Responsibilities

• Ensure the safety of team members from any harm, abuse, neglect, harassment, and exploitation to achieve the program’s goals of safeguarding implementation.
• Practice, promote and endorse the issues of safeguarding policy among team members and ensure the implementation of safeguarding standards in every course of action.
• Follow the safeguarding reporting procedure in case any reportable incident occurs, and encourage others to do so.

Qualifications

Several different professional profiles may be suitable for this role. This may suit individuals with a background in civil service or individuals with extensive non-profit advocacy work. Individuals with experience working in or effectively partnering with multilateral development (banks) institutions may also be a strong fit. What is essential is the ability to develop a clear strategy, a heightened instinct for what is impactful or worthwhile, and the skills to engage partners effectively. This includes building informal and possibly formal coalitions and broader stakeholder buy-in to advance an important cause. Empathy with people in extreme poverty and commitment to unleashing every person’s untapped potential are essential values that underscore all BRAC’s work.

Specific Skills and Abilities

• Positioning and leveraging events and organizations in the global international development arena for impact
• Ability to develop thoughtful and effective influence strategies
• Judgment that can see strategic ways to expand influence while deprioritizing engagements that are less likely to contribute to meaningful change on the ground
• Proven ability to build less formal or even more formal coalitions
• Superior communication, speaking and writing skills
• Political tact and ability to generate trust in wider relationships
• Persistence and commitment to delivering change
• Proven management and supervision of staff
• Demonstrated commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

Education and Experience:

• At least 20 years of work experience, with a preference for significant portions of this in Africa or Asia.
• Proven track record of policy engagement and influence at the regional and global levels.
• Master’s or higher postgraduate degree in a relevant field, such as Public Policy, Economics, Law, Business, or Social Work.

About the Organization

About BRAC

BRAC is one of the world’s largest development organizations dedicated to empowering people living in poverty. Working across 12 countries in South Asia and Africa, BRAC touches the lives of more than 120 million people worldwide. BRAC takes a holistic approach to alleviating poverty with programs that include microfinance, education, healthcare, food security programs and more.

About the Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative

The Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative (“UPGI”) is a global unit of BRAC that was founded in 2016 to build off of the success of BRAC’s Ultra-Poor Graduation program in Bangladesh. BRAC UPGI aims to position the Graduation approach as a key driver to eradicating extreme poverty worldwide. It does this by:

• Advocating for uptake of the Graduation approach by policymakers, national governments, multilateral institutions, and non-governmental organizations; and
• Effective adaptation and implementation of the Graduation approach in countries around the world, supported through technical assistance and capacity strengthening for external stakeholders.

In 2002, BRAC pioneered the Ultra-Poor Graduation (“Graduation”) approach in Bangladesh – a holistic intervention to help people lift themselves from extreme poverty – after recognizing that existing poverty alleviation programs were not reaching the poorest people. Through the provision of livelihood assets, cash transfers, and continued mentoring and training, the Graduation approach addresses participants’ multidimensional needs within the local context and ‘graduates’ people from extreme poverty into sustainable livelihoods.

Graduation is an evidence-based, scalable intervention proven to break the poverty trap for the long term. So far, BRAC’s flagship Graduation program has impacted over 2 million Bangladeshi households—totaling over 9 million people. To help eradicate extreme poverty, BRAC UPGI is working to scale globally by integrating Graduation into existing government programs and help 21 million more people lift themselves from extreme poverty by 2026.

But BRAC UPGI cannot do it alone. This is beyond the means and capacity of a single organization- no matter how ambitious or innovative. Sustainability and scale demands change at the systems level with active government engagement. BRAC UPGI is committed to creating effective solutions that leverage the available resources and existing programming to achieve the long-term benefits demonstrated by Graduation. The organization is partnering with governments, as well as multilateral institutions, NGOs, and civil society, in countries where BRAC UPGI thinks it can have maximum impact and drive greater uptake for Graduation.