Job Description

Position Overview 

Educate!, a fast-growing and award-winning social enterprise, is seeking an Experiments Manager to support the launch of an innovative new product for out-of-school youth in Kenya. In our first ten years, Educate! became the biggest youth skills provider in East Africa by scaling our proven in-school model to impact hundreds of thousands of youth in Uganda and Rwanda. In 2021, our top priority across the organization is testing a bootcamp model for out-of-school youth. We already have evidence that this type of model can lead to better life outcomes for youth and are looking for the right person to lead development and execution of a strategy to test and eventually scale this model.

Responsibilities

You are the right fit for this role if you;

• Are a strong manager and implementer who is able to translate vision into actions and gets things done as part of a team.


• Have significant program management experience that enables you to immediately bring considerable strategic value to a project. Experience in managing a project at an early stage is preferred. Experience in leading innovation within an organization is also preferred.


• Ability to guide others through major changes, encourage teamwork, develop team capabilities and motivate contributors to meet deadlines.


• Professional and interpersonal skills with the energy, vision and drive to succeed in a fast paced, high performance culture.

Sound like you or someone you know? Read below or visit our careers page to learn more about Educate!.

About Educate! 

Educate! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. We are a non-profit social enterprise with 150 staff and 300 volunteer youth mentors.

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.

Check out our COVID response page on our website to see how we’ve adapted to respond to school closures in East Africa in 2020.

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. Two rigorous external evaluations, including a randomized controlled trial, found that towards the end of secondary school, our program participants 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.

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.

Performance Objectives 

Program Management and Quality Assurance

• Oversee launch of Educate!’s pilot Bootcamp for out of school youth


• Set and manage to program goals to ensure that the program is executed efficiently and effectively to create maximum impact


• Build and execute systems to maintain quality assurance, ensuring that the program is being delivered as designed

Financial Management

• Manage program budget in line with our philosophy of maximizing impact for every Shilling that we spend


• Promptly and efficiently check and approve expenditures in the field, maintaining compliance with financial procedures

Performance Management

• Coach & Manage a team of Program Coordinators & Youth Trainers as they implement the bootcamp pilot program


• Recruit & Onboard new Program Coordinators & Youth Trainers

Partnership Engagement

• Lead engagement with local partners to ensure the smooth delivery of the bootcamp program


• Build and manage relationships with partner organizations, local gov’t officials, and service providers.

Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree, with a minimum of 3 years professional experience (4-5 years preferred).


• Excellent manager, motivator, and coach


• Comfortable managing a budget and using Excel; demonstrated project management experience; program management experience preferred but not required


• Fluent in English and Kiswahili, with strong writing skills in both


• Kenyan  nationals only


• Fits our Five Cultural Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here

• A good fit with our Five Cultural Tenets (see “What is Educate! About?” Below; learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here.

Terms

• This position will be based in Nairobi, but will require visits to rural districts and schools from time to time

• Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience.

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.

Preferred application deadline is May 10th. After that we will continue to accept applications on a rolling basis, with the goal of filling the position ASAP.

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.

How to Apply

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