2024 Country Officer Position for Uruguay at the World Bank – Apply Now!

The 2024 Country Officer will closely collaborate with the joint World Bank Group (WBG) team in Montevideo and report directly to the Resident Representative in Uruguay. This role involves fostering strong relationships with counterparts, clients, and the market in Uruguay to enhance IFC’s influence, pipeline, and portfolio in the country. Additionally, the Country Officer will play a crucial role in identifying collaborative initiatives and projects within the World Bank Group.

Role and Responsibilities

WBG Strategy

• Work with the Resident Representative and the Uruguay country team to oversee the formulation, development, and implementation of WBG strategy in Uruguay, with a special focus on private sector development.
• Support the preparation of WBG strategy documents, including Country Private Sector Diagnostics (CPSD 2.0), Country Partnership Frameworks (CPF), and other key documents and joint WBG activities.
• Work closely with IFC investment, advisory, upstream, and other relevant WBG teams to roll out the WBG’s strategy in Uruguay.
• Participate in designing approaches and interventions to create upstream markets and identifying needed market and regulatory reforms in Uruguay.
  IFC Investment and Advisory/Upstream Operations
• Oversee integration and delivery of IFC’s investment and advisory and Upstream activities in Uruguay to ensure client’s needs and objectives of IFC and the WBG are met.
• Identify, evaluate, and support complex IFC investments and sector projects by providing critical insights into the country context and the political economy.
• Participate in client selection and help ensure IFC works with appropriate sponsors. Share accountability for the quality and performance of IFC and WBG portfolios. 
• Support business development and origination of leads in close collaboration with the industry teams based on sector priorities.
• Provide business intelligence to investment teams to enable them to identify integrity issues, to devise adequate investment structuring, and to inform them adequately in the management of portfolio projects and problem cases.
• Assist the different project teams in coordinating missions, including managing relationships with key private-sector clients and stakeholders and following up after meetings.
• Identify opportunities to strengthen solutions offered to clients by involving other parts of the WBG based on a good understanding of the products and project requirements of WBG.
  

WBG Corporate Support

• Prepare/coordinate preparation of high-quality briefs for WBG senior management.
• Support the development of a variety of communication and briefing materials for internal and external audiences.
• Provide support for high profile events and high-level visiting missions.
• Ensure quality control of work products developed by the Uruguay country office.
• Ensure efficient and effective use of resources.
  

Representation

• Support WBG’s brand and overall communication strategy in Uruguay.
• In coordination with the Resident Representative, represent IFC and the WBG externally and provide visibility for IFC through organizing and participating in high profile events (high-level visits, seminars, and conferences). Ensure internal and external requests are addressed.
• Lead senior stakeholder discussions in acting capacity, as needed.
• In consultation with Resident Representative, conduct engagements with clients, stakeholders, and donors.

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Selection Criteria for 2024 Country Officer

• Master’s degree, preferably in economics, finance, business administration, public policy, or a similar field and at least 8-10 years of relevant experience. Relevant experience could include a proven track record in the financial sector, business consulting or investment banking, or experience with a multilateral organization.
• In-depth understanding of how IFC works, and its strategies and priorities.  Understanding of WBG’s mission, objectives and work at country level will be critical to the role.
• Ability to identify opportunities for WBG collaboration on high value projects and recognize potential conflicts of interest based on a good understanding of IFC (investment and advisory), and WBG products and project requirements. Ability to initiate such collaborative efforts withing WBG organizations to leverage its products and instruments. 
• Demonstrated extensive knowledge of Uruguay, including politics, history, social dynamics, culture, economics, local markets, and regulatory framework.
• Proven client relationship skills. Track record and ability to focus on private-sector client needs effectively. Ability to also understand the mindset of government officials.
• Capacity to understand, enable, and support private capital mobilization, as well as interventions to strengthen investment climate. Ability to participate and constructively contribute and lead as needed in meetings with government officials on constraints to private sector investments in Uruguay.
• Good analytical, financial, credit, integrity assessment, and business skills as well as strategic perspective to intuitively recognize project viability, bankability, and expected development impact early on, identify portfolio management vulnerabilities, and determine best approaches for managing complex transaction and portfolio risks.
• Knowledge of key sectors and industries in Uruguay, including their viability for market growth, and market challenges as well as implications of environmental and social sustainability issues, and how sector dynamics may evolve
• Outstanding communications skills and ability to develop a coherent and compelling storyline or rationale as to why specific deals are proposed and how they fit into WBG’s long-term strategy.
• Excellent critical thinking, analytical and presentation skills, and ability to work with or supervise the use of data utilizing standard office software Excel, Word, PowerPoint.

Languages

• Fluency in English and Spanish, both verbal and written skills.

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