Program Officer - Livelihoods

GiveWell • Full-time • Remote (United States) • $205.60k - $226.80k / year • 1w ago

Program Officer - Livelihoods

US + International

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GiveWell is a research organization that identifies and funds cost-effective giving opportunities, focusing on global health and well-being. Our work is funded by tens of thousands of donors who rely on our research to inform their giving. We’ve grown from raising $1.5 million annually in 2010 to raising ~$350 million in 2024.

We're hiring a Program Officer to scale up GiveWell's livelihoods grantmaking. This work will evaluate and recommend cost-effective programs that have the main aim of increasing income and consumption for people in extreme poverty. While we’ve previously made some grants to livelihoods programs, we've historically mostly funded programs that aim to avert death and disease. As a Program Officer leading the development of the portfolio, you will be a senior leader on this team, responsible for setting its grantmaking strategy and making recommendations that will shape its size and direction. If you find there is substantial cost-effective grantmaking potential, you may have the chance to grow the team and scale up the impact of our livelihoods investments. This is an exciting opportunity to help shape GiveWell’s thinking and funding in a space that is both underexplored and potentially high-impact.

The Role

As the Livelihoods Program Officer, you will:

Establish and develop GiveWell's livelihoods portfolio strategy and execution:

Develop a strategic vision for GiveWell's livelihoods grantmaking. This will consist of formulating and testing hypotheses on the most promising investment areas in livelihoods. In time, we envision you becoming a leader among peers in this space.
Expand GiveWell's portfolio of livelihoods grants. This will include:
Identifying investment areas which are (or have the potential to be) highly cost effective and can absorb substantial funding
Carrying out evidence review and building cost-effectiveness models for these areas
Investigating and recommending grant opportunities, including piloting new programs and conducting impact evaluations where appropriate
Developing methodologies for evaluating our grants' effectiveness both before and after a grant is made
Establishing high standards for the quality and rigor of our grant investigations and learning agendas across the portfolio

Lead GiveWell’s external engagement and build relationships in the livelihoods space:

Build a strong network of expert advisors in the global development and livelihoods space
Represent GiveWell at conferences and external events
Communicate effectively with select donors about our livelihoods work
Develop strong relationships with implementing partners and grantees
Proactively engage with other funders in the space to (a) better understand how we can fill gaps and (b) share our research to support others’ decision making

Contribute to GiveWell's broader research and organizational goals:

Uphold GiveWell’s core values: maximizing global well-being, truth-seeking, transparency, and considerateness
Provide input on team structure, capacity needs, and research priorities
Participate in recruiting and hiring efforts
Identify improvements to research methodologies and grantmaking processes
Invest in the professional development of junior members of our research team

Potentially establish and manage a small team conducting world-class research:

Make a recommendation as to whether and how GiveWell should further staff the livelihoods team
If we decide to create a small team, strategically prioritize team capacity to drive the highest-impact grantmaking opportunities

About You

The strongest candidates will have 10+ years of professional experience, a significant portion of which was used in similar or closely-related roles. In addition to relevant experience with the responsibilities listed above, we’ll be looking for someone with a strong track record of:

Rigorous analysis and critical thinking
Creating and using quantitative analysis and cost-effectiveness modeling
Strategic thinking and track record of self-directed execution (You'll be developing our portfolio strategy from scratch, so we need someone who takes ownership and drives results without close supervision.)
Getting things done in environments with competing priorities and multiple workstreams
Building relationships with diverse stakeholders
Excellent written and verbal communication, with an emphasis on directness and clarity

Preferentially but not by requirement, we’d like to find someone with experience:

Engaging with livelihoods-focused programs and global development work
Reviewing randomized controlled trials and impact evaluations, particularly those measuring consumption in low-income countries
Engaging with development economics literature and current debates in the field
Overseeing large budgets and/or grant portfolios

We also expect that people with the soft qualities below will be the most successful on our team. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but we hope it conveys the gist of our team’s professional personality:

GiveWell’s mission and methods are personally motivating and energizing.
You’re curious and a team player—you ask lots of questions, and you’re willing to interrogate your own and others’ work. You provide feedback in a considerate and constructive way, and are open to changing your mind as a result of others' input.
You routinely think about and surface the assumptions that underpin your conclusions. You understand the potential effects of mistaken mental models, so you strive to improve yours.
You especially appreciate it when people explicitly and clearly communicate about their confidence levels, and when their level of confidence is commensurate with the strength of the available evidence.
You love a gnarly problem. You figure out the most important questions to answer, go deep on the details where they matter (and move on where they don’t), and reassess your starting points based on what you’ve learned.

Details

Team: You'll report to a Senior Program Officer
Compensation:
NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $226,800
All other U.S. locations: $205,600
International: Custom based on location. We can give you a specific number on request..
Location: GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S. and abroad.
Offices: You are welcome but not required to work from our offices in Oakland, California; Brooklyn, NYC; or London, UK.
International work: We are happy to employ staff internationally on a case-by-case basis. Given the managerial nature of this role, a successful candidate will need to work hours that have a certain minimum overlap with American working hours and the schedules of key coworkers.
Flexibility: We support and encourage flexible working, including flexible hours, working remotely, and working from the office when you choose. The majority of our staff, including senior management, work flexibly in one way or another.
Visa Sponsorship: If you want to work in the United States and need a work visa, we’ll do our best to sponsor it (and also cover up to 100% of relocation expenses on a case-by-case basis). Please note that government entities ultimately dictate our ability to sponsor visas.
Benefits: Our benefits include:
Fully funded health, dental, vision, and life insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any dependents)
Four weeks of paid time off per year
16 weeks of fully paid parental leave
Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
403(b) retirement plan
Travel: Research team members are sometimes required to attend international site visits and conferences; on average 1-2 per year, with additional travel (including internationally) for those interested in traveling more.
Additionally, we strongly encourage staff members to attend quarterly whole-org and department retreats to bond with other team members and complete in-person work. As team leads, Program Officers are expected to attend the large majority of these. We'll discuss travel obligations in more detail during late stages of the hiring process, and plan to work with staff who have family or other obligations.
Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer.

Key Questions

Why is GiveWell expanding its livelihoods grantmaking?

To date, GiveWell has directed more funding to health than to livelihoods programs. One reason for that is that our current moral weights framework places especially high value on averting death and disease relative to increasing income and consumption.

However, we recognize that people hold different views on what outcomes are most important, and we take seriously alternative moral frameworks that place greater value on increasing income and consumption than our health-focused approach has to date. We’re creating this role because we’re open to putting a significant amount of funding toward the most cost-effective livelihoods interventions that we can find, as part of our ongoing effort to reflect the range of values held by our donors and program participants. (See this 2016 article for more discussion of ‘worldview diversification’ from GiveWell’s cofounder.)

So far, we’ve made some targeted investments in promising livelihoods opportunities, including grants to Malengo's educational migration program, research on GiveDirectly's cash transfer spillover effects, and a long-term follow-up study of Raising the Village's poverty alleviation program in Uganda. We think there are likely highly cost-effective livelihoods opportunities that we don’t yet know about or haven't fully explored. We’re excited for you to uncover them, and build upon our past work to help shape our approach to livelihoods going forward.

Why should you consider applying?

You'll have the opportunity to achieve significant personal impact on the lives and wellbeing of people around the world by establishing a new portfolio and potentially influencing the global livelihoods agenda.

GiveWell is at a unique moment in its history—we're currently focusing on strengthening our approach to grantmaking, including:

Improving our networks with experts and decision-makers
Exploring grant categories that are underexplored by GiveWell, including advocacy and market-shaping initiatives
Supporting different kinds of data collection, both quantitative and qualitative, to better inform program design

You'd help shape our evolution, influencing both the new livelihoods portfolio and GiveWell's broader decision-making.

You'll also have a large degree of autonomy. GiveWell has clearly-defined funding criteria, but as a senior leader on our team you'll have substantial freedom in deciding how to operationalize them.

Additionally, you may enjoy working on our research team, which is filled with people who prize intellectual rigor and care deeply about the world and each other.

What distinguishes GiveWell’s approach?

Our research team is entirely independent, partially because we rely on the support of many individual donors and partially because we prohibit single donors from funding a disproportionate amount of our operational expenses (more here). That means our team sets its own strategy and research agenda.
We focus on cost-effectiveness rather than other strategic frameworks (e.g. SDGs or community-led development). You can read about the moral weights that inform our views on cost-effectiveness here.
Transparency is one of our core values, and we take it very seriously. Publicly, we post our mistakes and virtually all of our research work. Internally, we have high standards for transparency, from writing style (we think reasoning transparency is very important) to collecting internal feedback (most internal documents are open for team comment at any time).

We encourage you to check out examples of our research in the “About GiveWell” section below to get a feel for the rigor we bring to our work.

What are some of the reasons I might not like this role?

This role may not be the right fit if:

You don’t find GiveWell’s mission appealing; for example, you don’t think that cost-effectiveness is a helpful criterion to decide how to allocate funding.
You dislike multitasking and people-facing work, and prefer to focus on one project at the time (If that’s the case, we encourage you to review our Senior Researcher job description).
You feel uncomfortable with making choices in situations of high uncertainty.
You would dislike not having a fixed budget allocation for your grantmaking area. GiveWell tries to allocate funds to the most cost effective giving opportunities we’re aware of. Because of this, we don’t allocate set amounts of money to specific portfolios, but make grants on a case-by-case basis.
You prefer to manage an established portfolio rather than building one from the ground up.

What is the hiring process like?

The steps in the hiring process are described below. Please note that we could choose not to move forward at any stage after application review. We plan to devote significant staff effort to application review, and we’ll respond to everyone who applies. After step 2, you’ll be in contact with a recruiter who will quickly answer any practical questions about the process or timelines.

Application.
45-minute skills test.
5-hour work trial, compensated at a salary-equivalent rate. You’ll meet with a member of our research team before completing this trial, and you’ll also have the option to complete an additional non-evaluative informational call with a recruiter.
Final work trial, compensated at a salary-equivalent rate.
Late-stage interviews with senior members of our research team.
Reference checks.
Offer.

About GiveWell

GiveWell makes grants to support cost-effective programs that save and improve lives. We focus on global health and poverty alleviation in the lowest-income parts of the world because that is where we’ve found we can have the greatest impact.

Since 2007, we’ve directed over $2.4 billion to cost-effective programs and interventions. In the last two years, we’ve made more than $500 million in grants. GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts, and we estimate that the funding we’ve directed will save more than 270,000 lives.

GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of Top Charities, which currently support seasonal malaria chemoprevention, antimalarial nets, vaccine incentivization, and vitamin A supplementation. However, most of our research capacity is devoted to finding cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs.

Recent grants have:

Helped governments to implement high-impact health programs, like in-line chlorination of drinking water in India and HIV/syphilis screening and treatment for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our recent grants to support treatment of clubfoot and to evaluate the program.
Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don’t have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Incubator and Evidence Action’s Accelerator to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we recently funded a program to provide diarrhea treatment to children in Nigeria that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
Tested our assumptions through further research, including studies on the effect of water chlorination on mortality, the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers’ income, and the effects of combining the RTS,S malaria vaccine and perennial malaria chemoprevention.

We never take for granted that GiveWell’s work is good for the world. We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even pay people to point out our errors). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including funding research and external analysis to address our uncertainties and insisting that our grantees conduct rigorous monitoring and evaluation. We change our minds when the evidence demands it.

Additional information

We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reads all components of every application carefully and considers the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.

GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at careers@givewell.org. We will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

By submitting an application, you acknowledge that you have read and consent to GiveWell's privacy statement for job applicants. By completing an application exercise, you acknowledge and assent to GiveWell's Work Trial Policy.

This position was originally posted by GiveWell and has been curated by PurposePhil Career. To apply, please visit the original listing on the "apply" link below. We are not affiliated with the employer organization of this job ad or consultancy, and provide this curated listing as a service to our users.

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