Program Manager, Rw- Feb 2023

Position Overview

Educate!, is currently seeking an outstanding people and project manager with experience in the education sector in Rwanda to join our growing team in Rwanda as the Program Manager. 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 manager a program 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 the Program team across multiple programs across the country. 

The right person for this opportunity is passionate about our mission and excels in  managing people, projects, and budget to achieve program goals. You should have experience teaching or training, be driven to contribute to the education sector, and be excited to create program resources by documenting existing procedures.

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 of 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

Program Management and Quality Assurance

• Oversee Educate!’s program in over 300 schools distributed across the country.
• 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.
• Work with performance matrix teams to ensure program milestones are achieved
• Build and maintain performance matrix tools while eliminating any loopholes with field teams.
• Develop program termly plans for the teams and ensure seamless execution of those plans

Financial Management

• Manage program budget in line with our philosophy of maximizing impact for every franc that we spend.
• Promptly and efficiently check and approve expenditures in the field, maintaining compliance with financial procedure.
• Lead Budget variation discussions with the finance department.
• Prepare a quarterly and annual budget for the program and ensure its prudent execution.
• Act as liaison between the programs team and finance team to answer any financial and operational needs of the field teams.   

  Performance Management

• Manage a team of about five Program Coordinators/officers and  as they implement the Educate! Exchange program at over 300 schools across the country.
• Lead the creation of district termly reports and their delivery by working with the program officers and coordinators as well as the local government.
• Collaborate with the design and experimentation team to identify any program design loopholes and propose possible solutions for improvement.
• Establish and manage systems for strategic alignment, open and regular communication, and team coordination, including annual and termly goals, team calendars, and team meetings.
• Provide coaching and other forms of professional development to  field teams especially program officers/coordinators and the youth leaders.
• Manage team performance and ensure that any performance issues are promptly flagged

Program Procedures

• Lead creation and updates of program procedures and staff handbooks, making sure that program procedures are accurately and effectively documented
• Review and edit proposed changes to ensure that they are accurate, well-stated, and user-friendly

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree, with a minimum of 3 years professional experience (4-5 years preferred).
• Familiarity with and experience in the education sector in Rwanda
• At least 1 year of training or teaching experience
• Excellent manager, motivator, and coach
• Comfortable managing a budget and using Excel; demonstrated project management experience; program management experience preferred but not required
• Fluency in Kinyarwanda and English with strong writing skills in both
• Rwandan citizenship required; Women are strongly encouraged to apply
• Fits 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 Kigali, but will require visits to rural districts and schools
• 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!

• 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 of 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 as 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.