Job Title: Senior Program Associate
Team / Function: Knowledge Creation & Management (KCM)
Reporting To: Senior Program Manager - KCM
Location: New Delhi (with travel as required)
Experience Range: 2-5 years in one or more areas - knowledge management, governance, social development sector, public policy, research, communications, or organisational learning environments.
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 promotions – to achieve the goals above; (c) strategic budgeting where resource allocation and revenue collection are based on evidence and cost-effectiveness; (d) and creating efficient systems to leverage external actors (including for-profit and nonprofit organisations). CEGIS partners with states to improve capacity by focusing on these pillars of State effectiveness, and aims to also integrate these horizontal governance improvements into integrated sectoral roadmaps to accelerate the achievement of state and national development outcomes.
Internally, CEGIS is organized into solutions teams that lead the design and technical quality control of our research and evidence-backed approaches to improving governance and state capacity; delivery" teams that lead state-facing work to contextualize the solutions, and support governments in implementing them; and enablement teams that enable the organization to function smoothly.
CEGIS@6 to CEGIS@10: Building on momentum to catalyse national development
Since its incorporation in 2019, CEGIS has gained significant momentum in building strong collaborations with state government(s) as a trusted partner who can provide both thought leadership and implementation support on key governance reforms. CEGIS position as a non-profit that does not take any funding from the government (other than in-kind contributions of office space/staff) has been a key enabler in earning this trust.
Beginning with 1 state government engagement in 2019, today CEGIS is working across 9 Indian states (Assam, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh). We also partner with union agencies/ministries such as Capacity Building Commission, Ministry of Women & Child Development (MoWCD), and Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation (MoSPI) to share insights from our state-level work to inform national-level guidelines and dissemination to other states. Finally, we also take on selected work at the district level to design and test implementation templates.
From a small group of founding members, we have grown to become a team of 150+ members located across the country, and expect to grow to over 200 in the coming year. Led by a former senior civil-servant with deep governance experience; state and solution team leads with decades of domain expertise; and enabling functions led by professionals with considerable corporate experience, the team at CEGIS brings together knowledge and experience that spans various sectors – from development economics, research, governance, management consulting, and social entrepreneurship.
Over the last 6 years, CEGIS has also garnered support for our vision and theory of change from several foundations and philanthropists whose partnership has enabled us to build our organisational capacity as well as continue to experiment and improve our solution design to augment state capacity and governance. With the rapidly growing demand for CEGISs offerings, CEGIS is well-positioned to play a key role in accelerating India's development.
To explore what the mission of CEGIS is and the impact we hope to have, please take a look at this video of our CEO, Dr Vijay Pingale.
The KCM team at CEGIS functions as an organisational enablement unit focused on transforming implementation experience, research insights, and operational learning into reusable organisational intelligence. The team works across state engagements, solution teams, leadership, and other enabling functions to ensure that institutional learnings are captured, curated, codified, and translated into high-quality knowledge outputs and products. The team contributes to organisational effectiveness through four major pillars:
Capture – institutional learning and implementation insights
Curate – quality assurance, synthesis, and structuring to create Knowledge.
Connect – dissemination, making discoverable, and maintaining repository systems
Collaborate – enabling cross-discipline knowledge flows and learning ecosystems
The KCM function contributes directly to governance outcomes by helping scale evidence-backed practices, improving institutional memory, strengthening solution understanding, and enabling replication of governance innovations across contexts.
The Senior Program Associate – KCM will support the design, execution, and strengthening of organisational knowledge frameworks and knowledge product workflows at CEGIS. The role involves working closely and in high frequency with project teams, solution verticals, leadership, other enabling functions and design teams to convert implementation experiences and research insights into structured, reusable, and high-quality knowledge outputs and products for internal and external audiences. The position requires a systems-thinking orientation, commitment towards a long-term change management objective, exceptionally hardworking and resilient demeanour, a temperament to work in a dynamic and complex environment to deliver on the consistent demands. The desirous quality needs to complement an execution-driven mindset in a dynamic environment with strong synthesis, skillful coordination, and AI-assisted content management capabilities to manage multiple tasks and exhibit smart workload management.
A. Knowledge Systems and Documentation
B. Knowledge Product Development
Support narrative synthesis, formatting coordination, and publication workflows.
C. AI-enabled Knowledge Workflows
Apply fact validation to AI-generated outputs.
D. Coordination, and Stakeholder Engagement
Coordinate with state teams, solution teams, and enabling functions.
E. Organisational Learning and Process Improvement
A. Domain Competencies-
Understanding of governance, policy ecosystems, and organisational learning spaces.
Awareness of knowledge management concepts, systems, and knowledge product development cycle.
B. Functional Competencies-
Strong writing, Synthesis, Research and Analytical skills
AI-assisted content management and prompt structuring capabilities
Knowledge organisation, taxonomy, and documentation skills
Project coordination and stakeholder management
Presentation and communication skills
C. Behavioural Competencies-
Committed to a long-term change management initiative
Learning agility and curiosity
Ability to work in ambiguity and evolving systems
Effective Collaboration and stakeholder sensitivity
Strong attention to quality and detail
Candidates should demonstrate familiarity with Generative AI-assisted workflows, prompting, and content systems, including:
Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Gamma, and equivalent.
AI-assisted drafting, summarisation, and synthesis workflows
Validation and quality review of AI-generated content
Responsible and ethical use of AI in knowledge management contexts
Pre-reads for the application process
Please go through the following materials before sending in your application:
Recommended listening:
Karthik Muralidharan on Making Governance More Effective — Sushasan | Podcast
The Centre for Effective Governance of Indian States (CEGIS) aims to improve lives by helping state governments deliver better development outcomes.
Our work is grounded in research, evidence and a practical orientation towards implementable ideas. We help state governments with the tools they need to design effective governance and expenditure reforms, while also offering strategic implementation support. Our focus is strengthening governance by improving four core functions of the government - outcome measurement, personnel management, strategic financial management and leveraging markets for improved public service delivery. Currently, we operate across the Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR), Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Telangana.
