Program Associate - Nutrition

The Program Associate will serve as the critical, on-ground position of our state-level technical support unit, embedded directly within the District Social Welfare Office (DSWO). The core mandate of this role is to pilot, refine, and ground-truth our solution stack across three priority pillars: administrative data quality, financial planning/utilization, and workforce capacity optimization. The Program Associate will translate state-level strategy into local execution while feeding ground realities back to the state team to iterate the model for scale. This is an action-oriented role requiring a balance of data fluency, public finance understanding, and exceptional stakeholder management skills within government systems. You will report to the Nutrition Project Lead based in Bhubaneswar, work closely with the OD-ECD team, and have active interactions with other team members across our states for effective project delivery.   About CEGIS Centre for Effective Governance of Indian States (CEGIS – pronounced See-Jis) aims to improve lives by helping Indian state governments deliver better development outcomes. We believe that the most impactful lever for accelerating national development is to improve governance and state capacity to better deliver core public services at scale. Informed by cutting-edge research and evidence as well as a practical orientation toward implementable ideas, CEGIS works with state governments in India to enable a transformative improvement in their functioning. CEGISs vision and Theory of Change (ToC) are an outcome of extensive research done by Prof. Karthik Muralidharan (CEGIS Co-Founder and Scientific Director) and outlined in his multiple award-winning, national bestselling book Accelerating India's Development , and enabled by strategic philanthropic support provided by Ashish Dhawan (CEGIS Co-Founder). CEGIS Approach and Model of Functioning: CEGISs solutions to enhance governance are co-created with state governments in a state-led way, where we focus on deep partnerships with states using an iterative cycle of think-demonstrate-document-transfer. We work closely with the top bureaucratic leadership, front-line workers and public officials in Finance, Planning, Human Resources and a few other priority line departments. Many of our solutions reflect ideas outlined in the book Accelerating India's Development , and these solutions are constantly refined based on real-time feedback and are designed to both be customized to the contexts we are working in, and to create templates that can provide the starting point for replication across contexts. Our focus areas reflect evidence that key characteristics of high-performing organisations include (a) measuring outcomes through reliable, high quality data that enables goal setting and progress monitoring; (b) strategic use of personnel – competency based hiring and training, skilling, and performance appraisals to determine job assignments, pay, and…