Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), New Delhi
Programme lead – Powering Livelihoods

Terms of Reference

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Designation offered: Programme Lead

Reporting to: Fellow and Director, Powering Livelihoods

Team:Energy Access

Location: New Delhi, India

Purpose

CEEW seeks to hire a Programme Lead for CEEW’s initiative Powering Livelihoods on building an ecosystem for clean energy powered livelihoods in rural India. CEEW offers an intellectually challenging and conducive work environment, with a focus on research rigour, innovative thinking, and strategic outreach.

The Energy Access team is one of the eight focus areas at the CEEW. Lack of access to energy is a barrier for households, communities, and enterprises in reaching their desired potential. CEEW has embarked on the initiative 'Powering Livelihoods', in association with Villgro, with an aim to catalyse a transformation of India’s rural economy with clean energy solutions. The $3 million initiative aims to provide capital, technical, and sectoral growth support to social enterprises deploying clean energy-powered livelihood appliances to help them undertake large-scale commercial deployments.

With the vision that within the next ten years DRE will be an integral part of all rural productive use applications, this programme seeks to ignite the transformation, few enterprises at a time. Powering Livelihoods bridges the commercial valley of death by providing financial and capacity-building support to enterprises with field-tested technologies to undertake commercial deployment of their solutions. The scale of these deployments is large enough to demonstrate commercial viability and make the key stakeholders take notice. Supporting commercial deployment drive enterprise growth enabling them to establish their business model and demonstrate a track record of operations, building a wider pool of investible opportunities in the sector.

The programme aims to achieve its objectives through three key streams of activities, viz, capital support, technical assistance and sectoral growth assistance.

Job Duties and Accountabilities

Partnerships and stakeholder management

• Manage partnership with key collaborators, including policy makers, enterprises, donors, programme partners, service delivery partners, and ecosystem stakeholders.
• Keep a tab on the policy, technological developments in the DRE for Livelihoods sector.
• Ensure proactive and regular communication, transparency, while managing expectations and ensure that each partnership is structured around mutual trust and adequate incentives for each partner to collaborate.
• Access and maintain adequate level of engagement with various partners and key stakeholders, especially with policymakers.\
• Undertake regulatory analysis for issues relevant to industrial competitiveness supporting CEEW’s research and advisory activities.
• Engage with stakeholders, represent CEEW and attend conferences and sessions.

Demand assessments, evidence generation and dissemination

• Lead demand assessment and research for various clean energy solutions for livelihoods. For example: RE-powered cold storages, solar looms, solar dryers, silk reeling machines, etc.
• Characterising the market including identifying demand, market barriers and their solutions\
• Assessing willingness to pay for prospective products/solutions
• Develop high quality engaging outputs in the forms of reports, data portals, blogs, opinion pieces, videos, etc. with respective support from the outreach team at CEEW
• Lead evidence generation or use the evidence generated from the commercial deployments, and use the evidence to unlock support for the enterprises from investors, financiers, policymakers and market enablers.
• Disseminate the generated evidence in the form of presentations, memos, short reports, opinion pieces, videos, etc. with the help of CEEW’s outreach team.
• Engage with key stakeholders to disseminate the evidence and to unlock support for programme enterprises and beyond.

Management and Leadership

• Take end-to-end ownership of the programme. Project management including management of resources, budgets, timelines and deliverables. Lead and support fund-raise activities. Strive for impact, and ensure CEEW maintains its thought leadership on the subject.

Shortlisting Criteria

Key Skills

• A graduate degree in engineering, economics, agriculture economics, development economics, public policy, energy economics, rural management or related disciplines
• Should have good foundational knowledge in issues concerning livelihoods and energy access.
• Experience in conducting impact evaluation studies and field surveys is desirable.
• Ability to analyse and visualise large data sets. Prior experience in the use of analytical/statistical tools like Excel/ R/ Python is a desirable skill.
• Ability to summarise and communicate the insights/findings as reports and presentations
• Ability to drive economic and financial analysis for techno-economic evaluations

Experience

• At least four years of relevant research experience in areas mentioned in the ‘Purpose’ section, with preferably overall experience of 7-9 years in agriculture, livelihood, energy access or any related sector
• Experience in delegating and managing workload across a team, as the hire will be expected to manage on multiple projects and multiple team members simultaneously.
• Experience in building and leading a team

Personality

• Willingness to learn new research and project management skills
• Ability to adapt to new environment and deliver under tight deadlines in a professional environment
• Striving for rigour in research and quality in work output
• Ability to effectively work in a team while being able to independently drive research with minimum assistance, when time demands
• Ability to dig deeper into details, while also keeping a sense of the broader objectives and big picture
• Willingness to learn, grow and develop at personal and professional front, at a rapid pace with a steep learning curve
• Ability to work in an interdisciplinary and multicultural environment

Main Skills

• Ability to identify technical and policy issues, interpret data, develop quantitative methods, and identify/ develop creative solutions
• Good written and oral communication skills; Good report writing skills
• Strong networking skills
• Ability to use MS Office application suite including MS Excel 
• Ability to represent the research and the organisation at various national and international platforms
• Desirable: Relevant publications in peer-reviewed journals/book chapters

Compensation

Competitive compensation – commensurate to the experience and matching the best of standards adopted by industry or other similar organizations for similar roles.

Application Process

CEEW is an equal opportunity employer, and the selection process does not discriminate on the basis of age, gender, caste, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality. Female candidates are encouraged to apply.

Interested candidates are requested to send their CV and cover letter (in one pdf) to jobs@ceew.in with  ‘Application – Programme Lead - Powering Livelihoods’ as the subject line. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Interested applicants are advised to apply at the earliest possible. Only shortlisted candidates will be notified by us. We appreciate your interest.