Advocacy Curriculum Lead, Installer Voices (Contract)

Job Description

New Energy Nexus (NEX) is an international NGO that supports climate solutions and builds a more equitable clean energy economy. Our laser focus is on clean energy entrepreneurs: providing them with funds, accelerators, and networks to thrive. They are our main audience and our agent of change.

We started in California in 2004 and now operate across China, India, Southeast Asia, East and West Africa, and Australia. We have leveraged US$5.4 billion in investment and supported more than 11,000 entrepreneurs.

About the Role & Opportunity

Solar and battery "micro" installers are one of the fastest-growing workforces of the clean energy transition, and one of the most overlooked. They are trusted in their communities, and their businesses live or die by policy conditions they currently have no hand in shaping. They have mostly been invisible in media narratives or in policy processes. This role exists to change that, by working out how to build the capacity and the collective voice of a group that has rarely been activated this way before.

This role is part of a broader initiative to find out how we can organize and activate the political power of these micro installers.

You will come at this from a background in communications and advocacy, in learning and capacity-building, or in both. What matters is that you have helped people find their voice and be heard, and you know how to build that capability in others. Here you get to do it for a workforce that has rarely expressed it collectively, in ways that influence policy.

There are few if any models for helping a distributed workforce like this become a credible public voice. Figuring out what that model looks like is the job. Over six months you get to the bottom of how time-poor installers running small businesses actually learn and what moves them, across five very different markets: Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Nigeria, and Pakistan. You map what training and support already exists for this group (and beyond!), you find the gaps, and you work out what it would take to fill them. From that you design and test a capacity-building framework that fits and moves them, step by step, from practical everyday communications toward engaging in policy processes and engaging decision makers. The through-line of everything you build is that these are busy business owners: they engage because it helps their business, and the capacity to advocate grows from there.

Philanthropic funders who know this field have backed NEX to prove the approach, with longer term investment ready if it holds. What you scope, design, and test in Phase 1 becomes the blueprint for how NEX builds installer capacity across markets in Phase 2.

Your thought partner and support through this engagement is the Chief Communications Officer (CCO), and you work closely with the Global Program Lead, who owns overall strategy and program design. You also work with a point of contact in each of the country offices.

Working at New Energy Nexus

You will join a small, global team building a new initiative inside a forward-thinking international NGO with deep installer and SME relationships. Your manager will respect your work-life balance and support you in bringing your whole self to work. This role is remote and part-time, with the flexibility to work across time zones.

A Typical Day

You spend the morning talking to a handful of installers about how they actually pick up new skills, what they would never make time for, and what would genuinely help their business. Then you dig through the training and support that already exists for this group in Indonesia and Thailand, marking what's useful and what's missing. After lunch you sketch a first version of a path that takes someone from confident customer conversations toward speaking to a journalist or a local official, and you gut-check it with a national coordinator who knows what will and won't land locally. You close the day working out how the same approach could be tailored for a Nigerian audience against a Pakistani one.

Core Responsibilities

Understand the audience and map what exists

• Build a deep, practical understanding of installers as an audience: time-poor small-business owners, motivated by commercial value, trusted locally, and new to public advocacy
• Audit the communications, advocacy, learning, and capacity-building support that already exists for this group across the five markets, and work out what NEX can build on
• Find the gaps: where the skills, confidence, and organisation that turn installers into a credible voice are missing, and what it would take to close them

Design the model and the blueprint

• Design a capacity-building approach that fits how these installers actually learn, and that moves them from practical communications toward media engagement, narrative, and public voice
• Ground it in how adults build confidence and skill, and in the commercial reality of an installer's business, so the entry point is always business value
• Produce the blueprint: what to build, in what sequence, and how it flexes across five different markets

Test and iterate

• Test the approach live with a small cohort of installers across at least two markets, and rebuild it around what works with this audience rather than what looks good on paper

Hand Phase 2 something it can run

• Turn the tested approach and your findings into the capacity-building component of the Phase 2 blueprint, including delivery model, per-market adaptation, and cost, in close partnership with the Global Programme Lead

Requirements

Required Skills

• You have built other people's capacity to communicate and advocate. You might have come to this through communications, campaigns, or advocacy work where you trained, coached, and grew spokespeople, activists, or community voices, or through learning, curriculum, and capacity-building design. Either route works. What matters is that you've done it, ideally across more than one market
• 7+ years of relevant experience, with a track record of training, coaching, or programmes that changed how people act, not just what they know
• Comfortable designing for adult, professional, non-academic, or hard-to-reach audiences, ideally in emerging markets and across cultures
• A scoper at heart: you can walk into an unfamiliar landscape, work out what exists and what's missing, and turn that into a clear plan
• Comfort with ambiguity and a fast start. You can research, design, test, and rebuild inside a six-month window
• Strong facilitation instincts and the judgment to read a room and adjust
• Exceptional English writing, and the skill to make complex ideas simple and usable
• You use AI tools thoughtfully to work faster while keeping high standards for originality and quality

Bonus Skills

• Media training, message development, or spokesperson coaching experience
• Experience building the skills or organising power of an underrepresented or overlooked group, for example through community organising or grassroots campaigning
• Familiarity with clean energy, climate, or working with SMEs and entrepreneurs
• Behavioural science or adult-learning research background
• A regional language (Bahasa Indonesia, Filipino, Thai, Urdu, Hausa, or others)

Benefits

How to Apply

Hit the apply button and attach your CV and a one-page cover letter answering:

1. What makes you a unique candidate for this role,
2. A time you helped a group or individuals find their voice and get heard, whether through training, coaching, curriculum, campaigning, or advocacy, and how you did it, and
3. A widely-used training or engagement approach you refuse to use, and why.

Cover letters and CVs that are not tailored to this specific role will be immediately disqualified.

New Energy Nexus is an equal employment opportunity employer and does not discriminate against applicants or employees because of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, citizenship status, disability status, genetic information, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression of an otherwise qualified individual, or membership in any other class protected by applicable law. New Energy Nexus hires and promotes individuals on the basis of their qualifications for the job to be filled. We strongly encourage applicants from under-represented and marginalized communities to apply.