Position Overview

Educate! is seeking enthusiastic and self-driven Design Consultant for our Team to strengthen Educate!’s capacity for high-quality and evidence-based product development across all our countries of operation. The Design Consultant will work with our Disruptive Innovations Unit and Global Design Function. Educate! lives a culture of data-driven decision-making through the application of human-centered design and user experience experimentation.

The Design Consultant 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 Design Consultant 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

Disruptive Innovation

• Manage design for the Out of School Youth Product, including adherence to the design process in the development and approval of all related materials for learners, trainers, mentors and staff.
• Manage pilots and experiments for design and implementation of program strategy ensuring changes to program design are informed by data and user feedback
• Support the design and training teams in the use of skinny data for decision making within the training environment
• Work closely with the Director of Disruptive Innovations to ensure that price constraints are integrated into program design
• Conduct regular check-ins with design team members
• Coach and manage design team members to achieve results and develop professionally

Global Design Function

• Support country teams in the application of systems and procedures for experimentation to validate new program/product ideas and innovations to optimize the user experience
• Support the management and coordination of design work across country teams for strategy alignment
• Provide feedback and coach country teams on the design of program materials
• Manage design team reflections and learning workshops for knowledge and experience sharing, internal and external experiment reports and best practices
• Design for strategic projects. This could include:
  • Researching best practices for leveraging technology for virtual/remote support for learning in low technology contexts, and, knowledge and learning management systems to support documentation and learning
  • Supporting the Regional Training Specialist in the development and implementation of global training and quality standards
  • Creating and leading global design task forces to research on the best solutions to executing emerging design strategies

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
• 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!