Position Overview
Educate! a fast-growing and award-winning social enterprise, is seeking a Head of Program Implementation in Rwanda. 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, Kenya and Rwanda.
In this role, you’ll lead a team to plan, and manage programs for Rwanda, driving towards Educate!’s long-term vision of designing solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa every year. The ideal candidate will have strong experience managing a program and successfully implementing initiatives that have achieved measurable results. This opportunity has all the challenges and excitement of a startup, with the benefits of building off a proven model at an organization with a strong reputation and track record. This role also involves working with Program managers and program teams across multiple programs across the country.
You are the right fit for this role if you;
- Are a strategic thinker who can move deftly from vision to execution—perceiving emerging opportunities, building a goal-oriented strategy, aligning internal and external stakeholders around a shared vision, and driving implementation.
- Have significant program management experience that enables you to immediately bring considerable strategic value to a project. Experience in managing a program 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.
- Strong analytical skills to identify business opportunities
- Demonstrated financial acumen, good understanding of budgeting and experience drafting proposals.
Sound like you or someone you know? Apply at this link Read below or visit our career page to learn more about Educate!.
About Educate!
What if there was a way to measurably change the trajectory of the lives of youth across Africa? Since its launch in 2009, Educate! has worked to do just this, delivering outsized impacts at scale and at disproportionately low cost, towards the aim of addressing youth unemployment. As a disruptive, nonprofit social enterprise, our team leverages an obsession with evidence and entrepreneurial drive to tackle one of our planet’s greatest challenges — unlocking the potential of its youngest continent.
Educate! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. We’ve created a 100-hour experience that delivers the most essential skills youth need to transition to work, combining training, mentorship, and practical experience starting a business. We deliver this experience to youth in 3 ways: directly to schools, integrated into education systems, and through bootcamps for out-of-school youth.
All three delivery channels have been validated by several independent evaluations, and to date, more than 200,000 youth have been meaningfully impacted by this model across Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya. Along the way, Educate! has become the largest youth skills provider in East Africa.
Educate! is a team of over 160 largely African staff and 300 volunteer youth mentors. We prioritize building an engaging, fulfilling, and growth-oriented work environment. 50% of our top 30 leaders have been with us for over 5 years, 10+ alumni have started other organizations and 5 current or former team members were Acumen Fund East Africa fellows.
We have been backed by top foundations such as Imaginable Futures, Big Bang Philanthropy, and Echidna Giving. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize and a 2015 WISE Award, and has been highlighted by Bill Gates, in the World Bank’s S4YE’s Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, BBC, 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 and by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a Goalkeepers Accelerator.
Educate!’s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year. Our plan is to grow our reach 3x over the next 3 years.
Performance Objectives
Program Implementation, Strategy and Evaluation
- Set growth and staffing strategy in line with the country’s 1 year and 3-year objectives.
- Develop systems and structures that enable the Programs team to respond rapidly and efficiently to opportunities to scale.
- Oversee evaluation strategy for the Exchange program, and ensure strategy responds to impact data.
- Experiment around efficient delivery mechanisms to maximize the impact of our program across distance.
- Develop systems and structures that enable the Programs team to respond rapidly and efficiently to opportunities to scale.
Performance Management
- Ensure that Educate! Culture is institutionalized and strengthened across a growing and increasingly dispersed field team.
- Drive field team recruitment and training strategies to ensure high-quality program delivery and scalable cost model.
- Oversee performance management for the programs team, including ensuring that goals are appropriately set, aligned, and managed to and overseeing performance review process for this team.
- High-growth staffing strategy: coverage of gaps, career planning for star performers, developing rising leaders, pipelines, and ensuring training and coaching programs are in place for dispersed field teams.
- Provide coaching and other forms of professional development to design, monitoring, and program support staff.
Financial Oversight
- Create or approve direct program, design & M&E budgets.
- Ensure managers submit monthly Budget versus Actual reports and re-allocate funds as necessary
- Oversee the integrity of our financial systems in the programs department, including approving transactions, managing against fraud, and setting a tone of strong financial accountability in the department
Program and Monitoring System Oversight
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- Establish and manage systems for quality control to ensure efficient and high-impact program delivery.
- Establish and manage systems for strategic alignment, open and regular communication, and team coordination, including annual and termly goals, team calendars, and team meetings.
- Ensure that communication channels on the programs team are open and well-used to achieve alignment on decisions and strategy and create an environment of open and honest two-way communication.
- Oversee program reporting, making sure that reports are prompt, regular, and contain useful and accurate information that can be validated and put into action.
- Oversee accurate data collection and verification, and ensure that decisions are driven by data.
Qualification
- Minimum of a Bachelor’s degree with 8+ years of work experience.
- 5-7 years management experience, with experience managing managers preferred.
- Experience in youth development programs
- Familiarity with and experience in the education sector in Rwanda.
- Excellent manager, motivator and coach that is ready to up skill an enthusiastic team.
- Fluent in English and Kinyarwanda, with strong writing skills in both.
- Rwandan nationals only.
- Fits our Five Cultural Tenets(see What Educate! About?below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck her
Terms
- The ideal person should be willing to live and operate within the assigned district in any part of the country.
- Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience.
- Benefits & perks include a generous vacation policy and health insurance.
Why You Will Brag About Working At Educate!
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- 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 — 96% of our staff is African.
- Our model has gone nationwide in Uganda — Educate!’s model is now incorporated into the national curriculum and exams, impacting many 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.
Application Process
Intrigued? Please visit here to apply. You will be asked to upload a resume, and your response to the some questions:
Applications deadline is 31st August 2022
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 your 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.
