Gender & Jobtech Specialist at Mercy Corps

The Position Summary

The Jobtech Gender Expert works with jobtech platforms to ensure that their services create and improve livelihoods for young women. S/he work across the portfolio of partnerships with startups to assess how platforms can improve their services for young women, and provides hands-on venture-building support to startups with high potential to improve their gender inclusiveness or to create large numbers of jobs for young women. In summary, the Expert will:

•  Understand and tackle barriers young women face in jobtech platforms.
•  Implement and participate in the design of inclusive strategies and approaches for Jobtech Alliance.
•  Work with individual platforms as technical assistance, on secondment, and/or embedded into the teams to deliver sprints which improve job accessibility for young and marginalized women, as well as supporting in the development of strategy, decision-making, operations and value chains with a gender inclusive lens.

 Specific Areas of Responsibility

GENDER-INCLUSION STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT

• Lead the design, implementation and evaluation of the Jobtech Alliance’s strategies for reaching gender goals within businesses and job platforms.
• Lead other research activities, including gender diagnostics, customer satisfaction studies, and contribute to the design of research framework and tools with a gender and inclusion lens.
• Conduct data collection, analysis and report writing of the monitoring and research efforts.

GENDER-FOCUSED VENTURE-BUILDING SUPPORT

• Provide hands-on support to jobtech platforms across Africa in individual sprints which improve gender inclusion and enhance outcomes for young women. This will include analysis of product design, marketing, or operations from a gender lens, and advise solutions toward improved inclusion of young women and other marginalized youth where needed.
• Provide capacity-building support and tools to jobtech platforms, where suitable, to improve their capacity to take a gender inclusive approach in their work.

RESEARCH & MARKET INSIGHTS

• Contribute to the overall development of the research agenda for the Jobtech Alliance and advise on learning questions, indicators, and tools to assess gender inclusion.
• Support the production of communication collateral to share learnings internally and externally, including blogs and similar products.

INTERNAL PROJECT COORDINATION

• Participate in internal project coordination and relationship building internally and externally for project planning and systems management, presentations of project results as needed and at times attend local events, meetings and networking activities.

Minimum Qualification & Transferable Skills

• 5-10 years of progressional experience in related field, including at least 2 years working in or with startups (in leadership, product, operations, or marketing)
• Expertise in design thinking and/or human-centred design, including conducting qualitative assessments and user experience mix-method surveys. Experience in UI/UX a plus.
• Demonstrated experience in gender, women’s economic empowerment, gendered entrepreneurial ecosystems, research on gender issues, or equivalent
• Experience working with products that specifically target women a plus.
• Excellent communications skills including effective writing skills, people skills and relationship management.
• Higher level education in related field.