Job Information
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Program Officer, Fortification Compliance – Nutrition (LTE) in Seattle, Washington
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
Do you want to solve malnutrition with innovations for compliance? Then this posting might be for you. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Nutrition team is working to increase access to adequate nutrition through a large-scale food fortification (LSFF) focused strategy. Food fortification means adding essential vitamins and minerals to everyday consumed foods such as salt, flour, and cooking oil. This is one of the most scalable, sustainable, and cost-effective tools to reduce malnutrition worldwide. We understand the fortification of commonly used foods as an integrated intervention within wider food and nutrition security policies. We capture this as the “one nutrition” approach in lockstep with the agricultural development’s food systems approach and the maternal, new-born and child health team’s focus on nutrition through health systems. The strategy will invest in ground-breaking solutions to produce practicable data; achieve innovations in micronutrients, food vehicles, and devices; enable technical assistance to millers and food inspectors to increase quality and compliance of fortified staples; promote regulation as well as more and better standards for fortification.
Our Nutrition strategy is part of the foundation’s Global Growth and Opportunity division which focuses on creating and scaling market-based innovations to stimulate inclusive and sustainable economic growth. We seek to catalyze sustainable transformative change in the face of inequities and market failures, to realize the potential of untapped markets, and to see the economic and social benefits of including everyone. Core areas are Agricultural Development; Financial Services for the Poor; the Global Education Program; and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. We seek solutions that are sustainable, transformative, and inclusive with an eye toward applying technology innovations as well as data evidence to inspire change in the world’s developing countries.
*This position is a limited-term position for 11 months. Relocation will not be provided.
Your Role
The Program Officer (PO), Fortification Compliance position will support our work around effective regulatory compliance in fortification. This is the key to sustaining fortification programs over time and covers quality assurance (QA) inside food production, as well as external quality control (QC). Fortification QA/QC is often resource-constrained and needs fresh innovation: How can fortification be piggy-backed with low effort on food safety monitoring? What would enable fortification monitoring to become more centered around testing in the field than relying on laboratories? What role could third parties play to assure fortification compliance in markets? Our work also covers efforts on digitizing the LSFF value chain.
Reporting to one of the Deputy Directors (DD) Nutrition and with a dotted line to a Senior Program Officer (SPO), you will support the management of the respective body of work. This includes handling a portfolio of investments, ensuring collaboration with colleagues across the team (especially as regards data initiatives), across the foundation and working with external partners and managing grantees to enable progress. We value various perspectives from the LMIC communities we serve. In doing so, we operate with agility – both with program structure and grant management – and incorporate user-centric approaches along the way.
What You’ll Do
Support innovative approaches for effective fortification compliance as a technical expert by refining strategy and execution through providing analytic, programmatic, and scientific insights.
Strong design and project management skills in collaboration with team members: Drive grant results that support strategy execution of fortification compliance systems and digitizing its value chain. This includes identifying new grant opportunities, managing existing grants and working closely with grantees to ensure project objectives are aligned with plans. And that they are being carried out in an agile manner that allows for course corrections as needed.
Specifically, you will contribute to multi-stakeholder partnerships globally and locally by intentionally shaping existing partnerships, scoping new partners, and discussing and co-creating solutions for fortification compliance with them. This also includes specifically collaborating with a consortium of partners that are working on different aspects of digital fortification traceability and quality management. The PO will be dedicated to integrating local voices.
Together with a project manager, drive the development and progress of a pipeline of innovative solutions for measuring and analyzing quality of fortified foods. This will include maintaining existing partnerships, scoping new technology opportunities, identifying pathways to scale promising technologies, and being intentionally inclusive of the local partner voice in developing solutions.
Concretely, also support impactful fortification compliance delivery partnerships and alliances by forming relationships and scaling solutions to strengthen LSFF in LMICs, via on site and remote / digital training tools and content by co-creating with partners. Engage in multi-stakeholder meetings and workshops, ideally including ease and experience with high-level events with a focus on local implementation impact in LMICs.
Partner closely within the nutrition team and across multiple foundation teams including those focused on maternal, newborn and child health, food systems, digital public infrastructure, program advocacy and communications and in our foundation offices – ensuring a coordinated and collaborative effort. Constantly seek feedback, integrate approaches, and cross-fertilize results within the foundation.
Support learning efforts and ultimately impact tracking by preparing briefs, synthesizing existing materials, and providing critical input for improvements about our investment portfolio (areas that need further support vs. areas that we could reduce our support), including around gender and diversity. Monitor and evaluate components of grants through milestone-based performance objectives.
Contribute to internal processes and portfolio progress oversight while ensuring appropriate documentation, grant budgeting and reporting, to achieve operational efficiency and effectiveness. Support development of annual investment plans and budgets. Plan, manage, and implement a wide range of activities in support of internal strategic planning including preparation of presentations, responding to specific requests for information on progress, presenting to the team and leadership on this strategic component.
Your Experience
Preferably advanced degree and / or equivalent experience in nutrition / food technology or related fields such as agriculture. Ideally, also business, governance, or sustainability qualifications.
Proven experience leading effective compliance projects, local implementation, (digital) monitoring, ideally with a relation to food security, nutrition, food processing, agriculture etc.
Experience working with partners from different sectors (public, private, social), ideally to achieve nutrition outcomes.
Are you creative and do you have an entrepreneurial approach? We seek people who enjoy working on sophisticated projects in a multicultural environment. We have great respect for varied experiences and points of view while collaboratively seeking solutions that have the potential to achieve ground-breaking innovations in the global LSFF sector.
Experienced in strategic project management, ideally including multiple partners, LMICs, (regulatory and digital) monitoring, and / or nutrition / food technologies. Committed to, or with demonstrated experience in embedding tools to address gender gaps and “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).”
Manage complexity: Build and support high impact, multi-stakeholder networks for LSFF compliance and collective impact approaches including through digital data. Understanding the complexities in implementing field-based programs and document findings, translating them into even more effective programs – ideally having applied agile methods to development projects before.
Be a solid teammate, with a demonstrated ability to work with optimism, patience, flexibility, efficiency, tenacity, and diplomacy in a fast-paced, ambitious environment, using a hypothesis-driven approach and an analytical mindset to develop sound strategies and implementation plans.
Communication and facilitation: We are looking for someone who thinks user-centrically and communicates in multi-stakeholder meetings, workshops, and convenings.
Ability to travel internationally and domestically up to 30% of the time.
Additional Experience
Previous LSFF experience or experience with related interventions.
Highly specialized skills for this position such as analytical chemistry or digital applications welcome
DEI and gender awareness and openness to learn, embrace and implement it, working with ease across different cultural contexts and based upon mutual trust. Experience working in LMIC and similar cross-cultural exposure, ideally including linguistic diversity. Candidates from LMICs would be preferred.
*Must be able to legally work in the country where this position is located without visa sponsorship.
Please note that the below compensation detail applies only to US-based employees
The salary range for this role is $137,500 to $171,850 USD. We recognize high-wage market differences in Seattle and Washington D.C., where our offices are located. The range for this role in these locations is $149,800 to $187,200 USD. As a mission-driven organization, we strive to balance competitive pay with our mission. New hires salaries are typically between the range minimum and the salary range midpoint. Actual placement in the range will depend on a candidate’s job-related skills, experience, and expertise, as evaluated during the interview process.
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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
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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.