Associate – Business Development & Project Coordination

Role Overview

We are looking for an organised, analytically minded Associate to play a central role in shaping the proposals and projects that drive our Social Sectors Financing portfolio within the Human Development practice. This is a hybrid role that sits at the intersection of strategy and delivery — well suited to someone who enjoys structuring complex ideas into compelling outputs and holding multidisciplinary teams to a high professional bar.

The Social Sectors Financing portfolio works on some of the most consequential questions in development: how governments and donors finance health, education, social protection, and nutrition; how scarce public resources can be deployed more effectively; and how new financing instruments can mobilise resources at the scale these challenges demand. Your role is to help us win this work and deliver it well.

Key Responsibilities

• End-to-End Proposal Coordination: Own the coordination of proposal processes from initial scoping through to submission for bids to governments, foundations, UN agencies, and bilateral donors across health, education, social protection, and nutrition.
• Proposal Content Drafting: Draft, structure, and edit proposal content, including technical narratives, workplans, team biographies, and supporting annexes, ensuring submissions are clear, compelling, and tightly aligned to client requirements.
• Budget Development: Support budget development in collaboration with senior colleagues and finance, contributing to commercially sound and donor-compliant submissions.
• Project Management: Coordinate live projects—tracking deliverables, managing internal workflows, monitoring timelines, and supporting the quality of client-facing outputs.
• Portfolio Systems Maintenance: Build and maintain the systems that keep a busy portfolio running well: opportunity pipelines, proposal trackers, partner databases, and project documentation.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Engage constructively with senior colleagues, partners, and clients, representing the practice professionally in coordination conversations.

Qualifications and Requirements

• 3–5 years of relevant professional experience in development consulting, advisory, international development, or a similar environment.
• Demonstrated experience contributing to proposal development—drafting technical sections, coordinating inputs, supporting workplans or budgets, or managing submission processes for donor or government bids.
• Strong writing and structuring skills, with the ability to produce clear, well-organised, and persuasive content under deadline pressure.
• Proven ability to coordinate multiple contributors and manage parallel workstreams without dropping the ball.
• High attention to detail and strong organisational instincts.
• Ability to work independently while engaging constructively with senior colleagues across a multidisciplinary team.
• Genuine interest in social sector policy and financing (health, education, social protection, nutrition, or related fields). Deep technical specialisation is not required.
• A Master's degree in public policy, economics, international development, public health, or a related field is desirable but not required. Strong relevant professional experience will be equally valued.

Advantageous Experience

• Experience working with UN agencies, foundations, or bilateral donors.
• Familiarity with donor proposal formats, logical frameworks, and results frameworks.
• Experience supporting project management, including tracking budgets and deliverables.
• Background or strong interest in public health nutrition.
• Working proficiency in French.