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GSMA mWomen Programme: Knowledge Manager

London-based with significant travel, Competitive salary

GSMA – Our role
The GSMA is the operator-led trade body for the global mobile industry. Our membership includes nearly 800 network operators that provide mobile communications services across more than 219 countries to over 4 billion consumers (85% of the world’s digital mobile market).

In addition, the GSMA also embraces more than 200 major vendors, partners and suppliers to the industry as Associate Members. These include many of the world’s leading mobile brands, from Ericsson, Nokia, LG and Huawei to major content and internet companies. Furthermore, we are established as a major inter-industry resource, partnering with those sectors seeking to leverage mobile to reach their strategic goals, for example financial services. Finally, we engage with a wide range of governments, regulators, and NGOs, for example The World Bank, UN and philanthropic organisations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The GSMA's work is focused on three areas:
• Mobile Broadband - Development of a ubiquitous Mobile Broadband infrastructure and the proliferation of devices that will connect the world’s population to the Internet.
• Mobile Lifestyle - Creation of innovative services and experiences that are delivered on the mobile infrastructure and unite the attributes of the web and communications world.
• Mobile Planet - Leverage mobility to help enrich and improve the lives of individuals across the developing world, bringing services to these markets in a socially responsible manner.

GSMA Development Fund
The GSMA Development Fund exists to accelerate economic, social and environmental development through the use of mobile technology. We believe that providing tangible, accessible mobile services to people in developing countries is invaluable to society and can help improve people’s lives.
The Development Fund leverages the industry expertise of the GSMA and its members, as well as the development expertise of international agencies and non-profit organisations to accelerate mobile services in three areas: Connectivity, Energy and mServices. Together with our partners, we incubate and replicate new mobile services in communities where they can make a positive difference.
We believe that “doing good is good business” and that with more than 3 billion users, ‘base of the pyramid’ markets are the future for mobile growth and innovation. The mobile industry is therefore uniquely positioned to deliver economic and social value to these markets.
In order to drive developments in this area, the Development Fund’s role is to catalyse innovation, drive market scaling and increase knowledge networking to achieve the following objectives:
• Increase the number of effective, scalable and replicable development initiatives using mobile technology in emerging markets.
• Implement these initiatives in a scalable and sustainable fashion, bringing socio-economic benefits to individuals and communities
• Increase awareness among governments and the development communities of how GSM voice and data networks act as an agent of development and can be used to bridge the digital divide.

GSMA mWomen Programme
The GSMA Development Fund in partnership with the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women launched the report “Women & Mobile: A Global Opportunity” at Mobile World Congress February 2010. The report, the first detailed global study of its kind, attempts to understand the nature of women mobile subscribers in low-to-middle income countries, and highlights the barriers facing women’s adoption of mobile technologies. It also shows that, by extending the benefits of mobile phone ownership to more women, a host of social and economic goals can be advanced. The report found that 93% of women report feeling safer because of their mobile phone, 85% of women report feeling more independent, and 41% of women report having increased income and professional opportunities once they own a mobile phone.

However, the report also found that a woman living in a low-to-middle income country is 21% less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. This figure increases to 23% in Africa, 24% in the Middle East, and 37% in South Asia. In turn, there are 300 million fewer female mobile subscribers than male subscribers in low-to-middle income countries. This mobile gender gap represents US$ 13B in unrealised annual incremental revenues for mobile network operators.

In response to this report, the GSMA mWomen programme was launched with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Cherie Blair and GSMA CEO Rob Conway in October 2010. The goal of the programme is to halve the mobile phone gender gap, increasing mobile phone ownership to 150 million women in the developing world. The programme also aims to leverage the mobile industry to provide life changing value added services to women in the areas of health, education, finance, and entrepreneurship through public/private partnerships with the international development community.

To achieve its goals, the mWomen programme works with key players in the mobile industry to:

• design the mWomen Business case to address the barriers to women’s mobile phone ownership
• increase the number of mobile products and services targeting women, particularly women living on less than $2/day
• increase the number of mobile industry marketing campaigns using empowering images of women
• increase the number of mobile network operators that track gender-specific operational data

To achieve its goals, the GSMA mWomen programme is conducting key research to understand the wants and needs of base of the pyramid women. To date, there is a lack of research on this consumer segment and in order to most effectively deliver services for women in developing countries, market research. Additionally, the GSMA mWomen Programme aims to serve as a thought leader and hub for knowledge and research on use of mobile technologies in the gender space.

The right candidate will join a dynamic, high performing team. There will be extensive travel opportunities, including within developing markets across South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

GSMA – The Role
The Knowledge Manager will be responsible for the creation, dissemination and management of knowledge in the mWomen arena. This will include developing a Knowledge Management strategy that will ensure that the mWomen Community has direct access to learnings gained through the GSMA mWomen Programme and maintains the GSMA mWomen Programme’s position as thought leader and knowledge hub.

The Knowledge Manager will also manage a bespoke research project on the wants and needs of base of the pyramid women. He/she will additionally travel to mWomen deployments around the world to document and study their structure, success or failure and extract knowledge from these cases that will assist the rest of the mWomen team and the mobile industry in better understanding the opportunities and challenges of mWomen. Further, the Knowledge Manager will manage and develop content for the programme’s online properties, specifically the website (www.mwomen.org) and social media platforms, and will support mWomen’s advocacy initiatives.

GSMA - The Person
The role requires an individual who is a well-organized team player, with a desire to further learnings about how mobile phones can empower women in the developing world and wants to play a role in supporting the programme’s goal of closing the mobile phone gender gap.

The ideal candidate should have the following qualifications:
- An advanced degree in gender studies or at least experience in managing large research projects
- Understanding of and passion for how mobile phones can empower women in the developing world
- Strong written ability – capable of developing story lines around in-field projects and extracting substantial insight into their inner workings
- Experience disseminating knowledge/research through online publications and social media, such as Twitter
- Technical awareness of online publishing in terms of websites, blog posts, Wikipedia entries, Twitter etc.
- Ability to develop and maintain relationships with industry and partners
- Highly professional – comfortable interacting with internal and external stakeholders, including C-level executives
- Able to quickly grasp new concepts and ideas
- Willingness to travel on an international basis
- Excellent cultural awareness and a desire to work with teams around the world
- Very conscientious – sets high personal standards and shows excellent attention to detail
- Proactive drive - demonstrates a “can do” attitude

GSMA - Package
This is a one-year contract position, with a possible option to extend based on available funding and performance review. Salary range is competitive, subject to experience.

The GSMA is able to provide suitably motivated candidates with a first class working environment, access to all of the key decision makers in one of the planet’s largest and most progressive industries and the content to keep a curious mind engaged. Many of our alumni have now taken key roles in the development of the industry.

Please submit applications to Cathy Webster at cwebster@gsm.org.