Position Overview

Educate! is seeking enthusiastic and self-driven Global Designer for our Global Team to strengthen Educate!’s capacity for high-quality and evidence-based program development across all our countries of operation. The Global Designers will work with our School and Education Systems Solution line. Educate! lives a culture of data-driven decision-making through the application of human-centered design and user experience experimentation.

The Global Designers will work with our design teams to develop content and materials to empower teachers to apply skills-based education and to promote students’ leadership, entrepreneurship, and workforce skills in East Africa.

The right people for this role are highly strategic designers – with experience in product design or learning experience design, and educational program design - who are energized and driven to empower multiple teams ensuring our programs create a lasting impact on students and youth. The ideal candidates have extensive experience in hands-on, interactive, iterative and collaborative education design approaches in either formal K-12, education reform or youth development.

Educate! currently works in more than 700 schools in Uganda and 170 schools in Rwanda, and this year we launched a 60-school pilot in Kenya in partnership with the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD). The Global Designers will help drive our ability to reach our Vision for 2024 of measurably impacting millions of youth annually across Africa.

About Educate!

Educate! is a non-profit social enterprise that prepares youth in Africa with the 21 century 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. Our model is delivered through practically-trained teachers and youth mentors. We’ve massively scaled up our program in the past several years, growing more than 4x since 2014. In 2019, we’re working in over 400 secondary schools in Rwanda, 60 pilot schools in Kenya, and over 800 schools in Uganda reaching over 42,000 students intensively and 530,000 more broadly. Our model has proven to have massive impact -- after the program, students earned DOUBLE the income of a control group and had a 44% increase in business creation. Our graduates change their lives and their communities, such as Lillian Aero who employs over 100 AIDS-affected women.

Educate!’s team includes almost 200 staff and almost 300 volunteer 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 the 2015 WISE Awards, and was featured by Forbes 30 under 30, Clinton Global Initiative and The Brookings Institution.

Educate!'s vision for 2024 is to measurably impact 1 million students and reach 4 million students more broadly across Africa each year.

Performance Objectives

School Systems Solutions

These solutions are presently being implemented in Uganda through the Educate!Experience Program (E!XP) and the Skilled Learning Program (SLP)

• Discovery and data interpretation for strategy (frameworks, analysis plan), and coaching and supporting the design team on data interpretation for decision making
• Design of practical, skills-based educational experiences for students and training for school-wide pedagogical changes. This can include designing for:

• • Skills Labs for teachers in Uganda to support the development of student-centered, active-learning pedagogy
  • Teacher Association training programs to support school-wide pedagogical change
  • Training of trainers
• Design for the leadership and entrepreneurship course (LEC) for students to gain business skills, support business club creation and project development. This can include designing for:
  • • Skills Day, Community Day, Mentoring week
    • School Business Clubs and Back Home Businesses
    • Mentor induction
    • Portfolio assessment
    • Scholarship program
•  Oversight of design updates for the Youth Business Experience (YBE) content
• Coordination of design tasks for the team to ensure adherence to design process, task prioritization, and timely completion
• Management of design and experimentation priorities and support the team to adjust as timelines and project priorities change
• Coach and manage design team members to achieve results and develop professionally

Education Systems Solution

This solution is presently being implemented in Rwanda and Kenya, as we explore other possible geographies in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• Oversight and quality control of program materials for national programs run alongside government education reforms. This can include:
  • Teacher training curricula
  • Training for district education officers on how to monitoring new policies
  • Capacity building workshops for government technical teams, and student learning materials.
• Development of technical materials for government policy development. This can include:
  • Draft scope and sequence, syllabi, teachers and learners guides
  • Policy guidelines for schools, and assessment standards.
• Creation of government workshop's facilitation strategy (how to organize government workshops to co-develop the best technical approach to education system change) and government workshop session designs (slide decks informed by research, proposals, and policy frameworks).

Qualifications

• Experience in program/product development - either product, (user) experience or education design- or research & development for product development
• Knowledge and experience in designing and implementing behavioral change
• Understanding and application of human-centered or iterative design approaches
• Engaging and interactive communicator with passion for coaching team members
• Highly strategic thinker
• Collaborative, data-oriented approach to problem solving
• Fits our Five Cultural Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here

Terms

• Location is East Africa with frequent travels across the region
• Must enjoy writing and design
• Compensation will be competitive for the social enterprise sector and commensurate with experience.

Why You Will Brag About Working At Educate!

• We’ve got the impact.
• Educate! is designed for scale. We quadrupled operations in 2019, Serving more than 1200 schools. 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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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!