Job Description

Educate!

Job Title: Product Owner & Design Lead – East Africa Based

Position Overview: Educate! an award winning non-profit social enterprise is seeking a Product Owner & Design Lead to join our ambitious design team; who will be a creative thinker with strong analytical, conceptual thinking, ability to identify user pains and build a superb digital product, instructional design, and writing skills.

These skills will be applied to tackling exciting projects looking to solve the youth employability skills gap in the informal sector in Kenya and beyond.

It requires an individual with a drive for constant learning and improvement, and passion for user-centred design.

About Educate!

Educate! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy.

We tackle youth unemployment by partnering with schools and governments to reform what schools teach and how they teach it, so that students in Africa have the skills to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs and drive development in their communities. Our model is delivered through practically-trained teachers and youth mentors. Educate!’s goal is to make this practical, skills-based model part of national education systems.

In 2019, we partnered with the government to pilot in 60+ schools in Kenya, worked in 275+ secondary schools in Rwanda, and 800+ schools in Uganda (25% of the country) reaching over 46,000 students intensively and 470,000 more broadly. In 2020 we continued to impact youth through distance learning and today we are leveraging that experience to create even more sustainable products that will impact more youth over the long term.

Two rigorous external evaluations, including a randomized controlled trial, found that towards the end of secondary school, participants of our program earn nearly DOUBLE the income of their peers. A follow-up RCT found that four years later, our graduates demonstrate large and durable shifts in skills, coupled with significant improvements in education and gender equity-related outcomes. Girls achieve even greater results. Our graduates change their lives and their communities, such as Daniel who leveraged both his medical education and the transferable and business skills gained through Educate! to open a rural health clinic in his community employing two people and conducting about 350 checkups per month.

Educate! is a non-profit social enterprise with about 130 staff and more than 300 youth mentors. We have been backed by top foundations such as MasterCard, Big Bang Philanthropy, Mulago, Echoing Green, Ashoka, and Global Innovation Fund. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize (and was featured in a video), a 2015 WISE Award, and was highlighted by Bill Gates, in the World Bank’s S4YE’s Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, Forbes 30 under 30, and The Brookings Institution as one of 14 case studies in their global scaling education learning initiative. Educate! was also selected by the UN’s Generation Unlimited as 1 of 20 innovative youth solutions.

Educate!’s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year.

Key Performance Objectives

The performance objectives cover 2 related areas: Product Ownership / new product development for our new Out of School Youth product, and Design leadership to build the training materials and learner experiences for this program.

Design Lead

Learning technology research, testing and management

• Research on, explore and perform a cost-benefit analysis of distance and in-person learning technologies, approaches and tools to support program delivery and optimize the user experience


• Learn from other mobile learning products (apps and websites), break down key features and think creatively about how to adapt them for our specific context / learners


• Content design and technology SME supporting the testing and adoption of new technologies for program delivery and upskilling of teams in their implementation and use


• Learning technology management and administration


• Collaboration with the M&E team on collecting, building, maintaining and storing learning data analytics through various learning technologies implemented.

Experiments Management

• Identify and test different pedagogical methods to determine the best fit for achieving different program outcomes (ex. teaching v/s coaching v/s mentoring)


• Identify and assess design features in different learning experiences through A/B testing and user journey mapping


• Generate hypotheses from data on user interaction and suggest trial designs to test these hypotheses

Product Owner

Manage the design and experiments process

• Manage design for the Out of School Youth (OoSY) Product to optimize the user experience and adhere to the design process in the development and approval of all related materials for learners, trainers, mentors and staff.


• Manage pilots and experiments for design and implementation of program strategy ensuring changes to program design are informed by data and user feedback


• Lead product design quality assurance and reporting


• Work closely with the OOSY Head of Program Launch and the OOSY Innovations Director to ensure that price constraints, impact goals, and product requirements are integrated into program design

Coach and support the design and training teams

• Support the design and training teams in the application and use of user-experience design for product development


• Support the design and training teams in data-driven decision making within the training environment


• Conduct regular check-ins with design team members


• Coach and manage design team members to build capacity, achieve results and develop professionally

Why You Will Brag About Working At Educate!

• We’ve got the impact.


• Educate! is designed for scale. We quadrupled operations in 2014, going from 54 to more than 200 schools served. We carefully measure our outcomes, and — here’s the best part — we are maintaining quality at four times the size.


• We believe in local leadership — 97% of our on the ground staff is African.


• Our model has gone nationwide in Uganda — Educate!’s model is now incorporated into the national curriculum and exams, impacting thousands more students than we can reach directly.


• Educate is a well-oiled learning machine. We built our model by methodically testing hundreds of assumptions and we are constantly experimenting, evaluating, and improving.


• We’re honored that luminaries and leaders like Oliver Wonekha, the Ugandan Ambassador to the US, and Ann Veneman, a former Secretary of Agriculture and head of Unicef, believe in us enough to have joined our advisory board.

What Is Educate! About?

We’re ambitious. Are you? Educate! is growing fast, so new opportunities are opening up and expanding all the time. We’re inspired by people with drive, and we love to help them reach their full potential. We expect everyone at Educate! to contribute above and beyond their job description, grow their skills, and advance their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey.

• We Put Youth First – The youth we serve come first. Always. In everything. That means we wake up thinking of ways we can serve youth even better and get the highest impact out of every dollar that we spend. It means Educate! doesn’t own a single vehicle, because we’d rather take the bus if it means one more student can participate. It means making every decision like the future depends on it — because if we get our way, it does.


• We Are Always Learning – When you work at Educate!, educating yourself is part of your job too. We encourage every employee to find the best book on management; share the latest article on graphic design; bring in your favorite college mentor; or meet the researcher pushing the edge of the field. We are always thirsty for knowledge and love to share.


• We Only Solve a Problem Once – We are allergic to band-aids so we love the person who brings the new system to solve the problem for good, even problems we haven’t recognized yet.


• We Are Flexible – We thrive on change — we’re driving it. We are growing every day, so we have to adapt quickly to meet new challenges, and our team keeps up.


• We Exceed Expectations – We assume we can achieve the impossible because we already have, year after year. We want our staff to create their own challenges, ask the toughest questions, and dream scary big!

Every person at Educate! — from interns to the executive director — is evaluated by how they live up to these five cultural tenets. They are at the core of how we achieve our mission and why we work as well as we do.

Educate is committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all who interact in our community. In creating this environment, we encourage people from a variety of cultures, backgrounds and life experiences to join our diverse team.

CLICK HERE to apply online.

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