IT Business Analyst

Position Overview

Educate!, a high-growth and award-winning non-profit social enterprise, is looking for a Business Analyst to work on the Comprehensive Assessment Management Information System. 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.

According to Ministerial Guidelines on Comprehensive Assessment issued in 2019, all assessment results, must be recorded and reported to different levels (sector, district and national).The results should be analyzed and visualized to provide a general picture of the learner's performance and implementation status of the curriculum. The business analyst will collaborate with a variety of stakeholders to understand requirements for the technology products/solutions, develop product roadmaps and project-manage the entire technology product/solution development cycle. The ideal hire is passionate about working with data to drive improvements in user experience and excited to work with government stakeholders, teachers, and other education stakeholders to ensure the success of this system.

This role reports to the Director General NESA and works closely with the CAMIS task force comprised of software developers and system administrators for a period of two years.

The right person for this role:

• Is a master coordinator and exceptional project manager
• Is analytical and data-driven
• Will have an end-user focus
• Will have strong communication and interpersonal skills; must be great at building and maintaining relationships

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, through a product-led approach to youth development. As a disruptive, not-for-profit, social enterprise, our team leverages an obsession with evidence and entrepreneurial drive to tackle one our planet's greatest challenges - unlocking the potential of its youngest continent.

Educate!’s core model combines training in key skills with access to practical experience starting a business and mentorship, a formula that has been validated by several independent evaluations. This model is distributed through products targeting two lead channels. First, Educate! works with governments to help reform education systems at scale through policy change, teacher behavior change and tech-enabled products targeting systems-level sustainability, while also working directly with select schools. Second, Educate! builds employment-focused bootcamps and business support services targeting out-of-school youth left out of the education system. To date, more than 200,000 youth have been meaningfully impacted by this model across Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya and 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 have been backed by top foundations and product leaders such as Imaginable Futures, Big Bang Philanthropy, Echoing Green, the 1st Google Employee’s foundation, the head of Google Search and Rippleworks Foundation. 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 and 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.

Performance Objectives

Requirements gathering: Translating Product strategy into product development specifics

• Gather all information from cross-functional teams to translate strategy into clear product specifics.
• Assist business stakeholders to define and refine their requests
• Collaborate with a variety of stakeholders to define the relevant personas, user journeys, and functional requirements.
• Drive decision-making with internal partners
• Translate requirements into product designs
• Develop and own a product strategy that is clearly articulated, easily understood, and delivers meaningful value to NESA customers and business over time
• Identify areas for modification in existing programs and subsequently develop these modifications requirements

User-focused/Customer-centered product design

We need a Business Analyst to build processes and practices to continuously gather and address usability issues with NESA technology products.

• Lead ideation for the needs identified- creating designs based on requirements and strategy
• Construct systems and processes to gather data on how users actually experience it on a day to day basis
• Own process of integrating  customer feedback into products under NESA’s guidance

Market Research and User Testing

• Research and analyze the users, and the roadmap for the product
• Plan, prepare and conduct research on potential solutions
• Collect quantitative and qualitative product data and metrics through market research
• Testing and evaluating new designs/ product features
• Research and analyze the way CAMIS data can be used and then drive improvements in user experience

Project Management

• Build and execute an actionable roadmap that empowers developers to realize the product strategy
• Providing vision and direction to the development team and stakeholders to achieve the product vision
• Collaborate closely with NESA departments to drive the execution of the product development team
• Plan and prioritize product feature backlog and development for the product
• Lead the planning product release plans and set the expectation for delivery of new  functionalities
• Developer management: oversee development of product features either through external consultants or development
• Develop quality assurance procedures

Qualifications and profile

• Bachelor’s degree, and a minimum of 3 years of work experience in project management.
• Experience in UX research: using qualitative and quantitative data (especially from A/B tests) to make product decisions.
• Experience in project management (PMP, Prince2 or Agile)
• Have experience working with government agencies to deliver software
• Have experience working closely with teachers
• Possess a broad understanding of the tech product development process
• Have independently driven the design of technology products in a team, with a strong focus on the end-user
• Software Development experience [e.g. USSD system development (PHP or other languages), MySQL, JavaScript]
• Passion for Educate!’s mission is a must, but past work in education or youth development is not required. We value diverse perspectives and encourage applications from people with a variety of backgrounds.
• Fits our Five Cultural Tenets(see What Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate! culture deck here
• This role will preferable be based in Kigali, Rwanda, 

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.