Position Overview 

Educate! is seeking an enthusiastic and self-driven Global Designer for our Global Team to work with our Education Systems implemented by the government. Educate! lives a culture of data-driven decision-making through the application of human-centered design and user experience experimentation.

The Global Designer will work on design focussed on teachers and education systems. The right person for this role is a highly strategic learning designer with a formal background in education who is energized and driven to support educational reform ensuring our programs create a lasting impact on students and youth.

The ideal candidate has extensive experience in educational program design, advocacy, teacher training, communication, capacity building of government officials and education reform.

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 boot camp model for out-of-school youth.

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

Education Systems Solution

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

• Learning design of program materials for national programs which 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.
• Design of program materials for government engagement. This can include
  • Concepts and materials for conferences and events
  • Curricula and learning materials for professional short courses
  • Materials for webinars and other engagement activities
• Design 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.
• Training of teachers and government officials on educational reform support areas and materials designed
• Communication and advocacy with government officials on our methodology
• 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 

• Degree in education preferable, post-graduate qualification would be an added advantage
• Experience in learning or education design
• 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 advocacy
• 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

Location

• Location is East Africa with frequent travels across the region

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!

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.