a global community
Transparency & Accountability Initiative
Open Society Foundation–London
Application Deadline: August 21, 2011
The Open Society Foundations work to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens. To achieve this mission, the Foundations seek to shape public policies that assure greater fairness in political, legal, and economic systems and safeguard fundamental rights. On a local level, the Open Society Foundations implement a range of initiatives to advance justice, education, public health, and independent media. At the same time, we build alliances across borders and continents on issues such as corruption and freedom of information. The Foundations place a high priority on protecting and improving the lives of people in marginalized communities.
Investor and philanthropist George Soros established the Open Society Foundations, starting in 1984, to help countries make the transition from communism. Its activities have grown to encompass the United States and more than 70 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Each Foundation relies on the expertise of boards composed of eminent citizens who determine individual agendas based on local priorities.
The Transparency and Accountability field is one of the fastest growing public movements of recent years. The International Budget Partnership, Transparency International, Revenue Watch Institute, Global Witness, the nascent aid transparency movement and many other leading civil society organisations have laid the groundwork. There is now a huge potential to make ambitious, concrete gains in the next decade by bringing together the different strands of what has emerged as a thriving movement of transparency and accountability initiatives worldwide.
The Transparency and Accountability Initiative is a donor collaborative that aims to seize this momentum and expand the impact, scale and coordination of funding and activity in the transparency and accountability field, as well as explore applications of this work in new areas. The Initiative was created by a group of global, private and government funders committed to strengthening democracy and development through empowering people to hold their governing institutions to account: Ford Foundation, Hivos, International Budget Partnership, Omidyar Network, Open Society Foundations, Revenue Watch Institute, United Kingdom Department for International Development and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. It is co-chaired by OSF and DFID.
Without a better understanding of impact and better learning, transparency and accountability initiatives will not deliver on their promise. The Transparency and Accountability Initiative seeks a Program Officer (research and learning) to support its impact and learning working group by developing, managing and monitoring a number of research and evaluation projects.
The goal of the working group is to enable funders and transparency/accountability practitioners to learn about where, when and how initiatives succeed, and use this knowledge to inform more effective transparency and accountability interventions. In support of this goal, we will support longitudinal research across contexts and transparency and accountability sectors, impact evaluation (e.g. budget transparency, freedom of information, natural resource governance) as well as comparative case studies of policy and programmatic innovations. We support leading transparency and accountability organisations in designing their impact and learning programs. We are also exploring the possibility of supporting long term institutional funding for transparency and accountability impact and learning initiatives.
We are looking for an individual with a passion and deep interest in transparency and accountability issues, with strong understanding and experience of using applied research methods, impact evaluation techniques and learning tools. The successful candidate will have demonstrated experience of managing research projects and communicating research findings. This position provides a unique opportunity to use knowledge of diverse research methods in impact and learning to help strengthen, influence and improve the next generation of transparency and accountability initiatives.
The Program Officer will report to the T/A Initiative Program Director. The position will be based at the London-based Open Society Foundations, which hosts the Transparency and Accountability Initiative. It will be offered as a fixed-term contract to July 2013.
September 2011. The successful candidate will be offered a fixed term contract until July 2013 with possibility of extension.
£38,000 - £42,000, excellent benefits package
Please email resume and cover letter to: recruitment-EE@osf-eu.org by Sunday, 21 August 2011. Include job code in subject line: PO/TA
No phone calls, please. The Open Society Foundations is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
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