Director, Innovation – Global Climate Resilience Collective
About People’s Courage International
People’s Courage International (PCI) is a US-based nonprofit that empowers community-led organizations across South and Southeast Asia to build resilience of vulnerable communities. Through strategy, funding, and capacity building, PCI anchors large-scale initiatives in the region. Key initiatives of PCI include the Migrants Resilience Collaborative (MRC), which has served ~7 million households over the past four years, and the Grassroots Resilience Institute (GRI), which builds core capacities of 50+ grassroots organizations in India. Recently, PCI launched the Global Climate Resilience Collective. The position advertised is to lead the innovations portfolio for this initiative.
About The Global Climate Resilience Collective
The Global Climate Resilience Collective is PCI’s new initiative to ensure climate-affected informal workers and internal migrants have access to effective social protection and adaptation supports to build their resilience. It builds on the mission and strategy of the Migrants Resilience Collaborative, with a particular focus on those most vulnerable to climate impacts. Through scaling direct support for communities, policy advocacy based on grounded research and program innovations, and public campaigning, we aim to bring greater public and private investment into protecting vulnerable communities.
See the appendix of the concept note of GCRC.
Global Development Incubator (GDI) is a strategic advisory partner to People’s Courage International, supporting the development of the GCRC initiative.
About the Position
GCRC includes three verticals: implementation, innovation, and public campaigns. Below is our current team structure. We are looking for an individual to lead the innovation vertical.
Responsibilities
We are looking for an individual experienced in strategy development, program design, and program management, with a facilitative and open-minded leadership style. This includes:
Strategy and initiative building: develop the goals and approach of the initiative with the leadership
- Work closely with the CEO to set GCRC’s goals and program priorities
- Build and execute the right portfolio of projects across research and innovations
- Work closely with the senior leadership to onboard the right collaborations and partnerships for programming that support the advocacy goals
Program Design: engage on research and innovation project ideas. Ideally, with experience in the climate adaptation / social protection space
- Engage deeply on the core issue areas
- Establish strong projects that close the evidence gaps on climate adaptation, including by onboarding the right implementers and evaluators to execute projects
- Support in alignment and development of implementation projects
Portfolio Construction: find the balance of projects and partner requirements
- Demonstrate a strategic and methodical approach in selection of projects and partners, while also taking opportunities as they come
- Optimize for projects with the potential to be scaled and funded by government and private capital
Facilitation: build bridges across teams to promote collaboration, and can find alignment between GCRC and priorities of key stakeholders
- Support team members in guiding/structuring engagements with partners, and ensure
collaboration across research and innovation teams - Ability to develop ideas, collaborate, and also push back with leadership / other teams
based on pursuit of goals - Help build partnerships that boost likelihood of our on-ground projects leading to
adoption by government and industry
Leadership style: coach and improve team capacity with a focus on empathy, creating opportunities for people to grow
Qualifications
Minimum
- 10+ years of experience
- Experience in at least two out of three between strategy development, portfolio
construction and management, program design - Facilitative leadership style, with experience in manging and developing teams
Ideal
- Experience in senior leadership positions or working very closely with the senior-most
leader of a large-scale initiative - Experience in either one of labour rights, social protection, climate adaptation
Compensation and Benefits
- The salary range for this position is USD 55,000 to USD 65,000 per year
- Benefits package to be fixed during recruitment process
Application Process
If you are interested in this position and meet the qualifications above, please fill this short form that will ask for basic details, as well as a submission of a single PDF document containing a resume followed by a one-page cover letter. Please note that the cover letter is considered an important aspect of the application and will be evaluated against the qualifications above. Applications that do not include a cover letter will not be considered. Shortlisted candidates will be contacted by or before 27th January 2025.
The application process will include an assignment and 3-4 interviews. The final round will be in-person in line with our leadership recruitment policy.
Additional Information
Position: Director – Innovation
Report to: Ashif Shaikh, CEO, People’s Courage International
Location: India, Delhi (preferred) / Bangalore / Mumbai
Apply by: 9th January 2025
For queries: varun@peoplescourageinternational.org with subject “Director – Innovation query”
Appendix: Global Climate Resilience Collective concept note
Over the past year, PCI started exploring more deeply the impacts of extreme weather events on such migrant populations and how we can address the growing pressures these communities face due to climate change. The macro-level facts are not surprising for those who have been in this space:
- Climate change may push more than 720 million people back into poverty globally by 2050.
- Climate change could force over 200 million more people to migrate within their own countries, with the overall number of internal migrants rising to a billion
- Even under a 1.5-degree Celsius scenario, the productivity loss by 2030 for labourers is estimated at between 80-136 million full-time jobs worldwide
- Women face more than double the brunt: globally, an estimated 236 million women and girls may fall into food insecurity, compared to 105 million men and boys by 2050, and up to 158 million women and girls could be pushed into poverty.
Today, climate adaptation practice mostly focuses on responses to climate extremes. There is
- Limited focus on slow onset events,
- Limited focus on medium- to long-term impacts of climate change that affect 100s of millions and which are likely to materialize even in low-warming scenarios, and
- Limited intersection between climate and labor interventions to really focus on people, rather than isolated issues
Ultimately, this leads to limited investment in people-centric, adaptation programs. 95% of climate investments are allocated for mitigation. And the investment on adaptation is estimated at $63 billion against a need of over $350 billion annually.
Our Approach
Our objective is to build on MRC’s strategy of direct support and systems change to ensure people- centric social protection and other adaptation supports for climate-affected migrants and vulnerable households. People centric refers to our core value and principle whereby everything we do – research studies, intervention design, advocacy – needs to capture, communicate, and platform the perspective of these communities. For example, any policy proposal we share will be vetted by communities we serve. And any research we conduct will share the stories of people who are impacted.
Geographically, our focus is global with this work, with an emphasis on South and Southeast Asia where we will work directly and with partners on the ground. Below we share how our planned intervention components feed into our broader goals.
Each component aims to address the key barriers of invisibility of vulnerable populations, lack of people- centricity in the climate movement, and limited evidence and investment of scalable solutions.
Where we are today
Over the past year, we have begun setting up a multi-country team, started working with partners and closely engaging with communities across countries. This includes defining the key components of our work and starting to work on the ground with communities and CBO partners. Specifics include:
Component 1: Implementation: We have started working with 15 CBO partners across Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nepal, and The Philippines to develop solutions for climate-impacted communities. Along with these and other partners, we intend to serve >1 million households directly by 2027
Component 2: Policy advocacy: To address the evidence gap, we published:
- Coping With Climate: How extreme weather is already impacting internal migrants. This included a survey of ~24K internal migrants to understand impacts of extreme weather events
- ‘Voices of Resilience: Stories of internal migrants coping with climate change’. This included ~20 written and video case studies captured to share the human side of climate change.
By 2027, we aim to conduct pilots and research studies for key worker segments (e.g., agricultural labourers, construction workers, small-scale fishers) across 5 countries to develop program and financing proposals to advocate for their needs.
Component 3: Public campaign: We aim to execute a sustained multi-country people-centric campaign grounded in components 1 and 2 and elevate the need and approach for people-centric work.