Design Manager, Rwanda – Educate!

Design Manager, Rwanda

Position Overview

Educate! is seeking a superb Design Manager to lead our design department in Rwanda. As a Design Manager, you will lead the planning and management of design needs and experiments in Rwanda in collaboration with other departments. The role involves the creation of new designs and improvement of existing designs based on the intended objectives of the programs department while aligning to all government policies and procedures.

The Design Manager will work closely with Monitoring & Evaluation Coordinator and Program Managers to design interactive teacher training sessions on all components of the competency-based curriculum in entrepreneurship in Rwanda. This role requires a flexible “adaptability to change” attitude, and a love for writing and design, since a lot of time will be spent in designing teacher training programs, training, and lesson plans. Strong attention to detail will be required as the Design Manager will design training materials across all programs as needed. He/she will also collaborate closely with the global design team, the field staff to generate new ideas in design.

The Design Manager will report to the Head of Program Implementation and Director of Design and Experiments, and will directly supervise the Program Experimentation Coordinator.

About Educate!

Educate! is a non-profit social enterprise that prepares youth in Africa with 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 a 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.

Performance Objectives

Design Management – 45%

• Design training needs & examination framework, trainings & teaching materials, across all programs for several different audiences
• Utilize instructional design concepts and principles to design and develop instructional interactions to create interactive and engaging course content
• Work with the programs and Monitoring & Evaluation team on mapping out termly activities
• Oversee and ensure the quality of Pre-Term Refresher training and all designed program activities

Experimentation Oversight – 25%Build experimentation tools & systems, oversee experiments process and design of experiments across all programs. Identify design solutions that could increase impact or cost-effectiveness to inform Experiments on discovery and prototyping

• Build the capacity of the experimentation coordinator and Rwanda teams on how to use experimentation to drive impact & improvement
• Improve the design of our Programs through constant learning and experimentation

 Country Design Reporting & Logistics Management (20%)

• Create a program design plan for upcoming terms, Implement training and program designs activities in collaboration with the programs teams (ensure the team is prepared to implement the program design and strategy through mock-ups)
• Create a system for planning, management, and quality assurance of design materials. Publish monthly design and training reports updating the design planning and progress
• Develop tools to generate insights on the user’s experience of program activities, detailed personas, and user journeys. Participate in field visits to measure program quality on an ongoing basis
• Support the Monitoring & Evaluation team to Identify and develop strategic design questions on Educate! Exchange and Exchange Follow Up Programs for termly Meetings. Review monitoring data on the progress of teacher pedagogical change & school-based in-service teacher training to inform and adapt design inputs where necessary
• Coordinate with the Programs teams to ensure all their termly activities (all training dates and upcoming program activities) are captured in the Design Training Tracker in good time for forwarding planning

Learning & Reform Design Assistance (10%)

• Assist National Program Manager with the design of government workshops, leveraging on feedback on sessions designed by them to designing new content
• Complete design academy modules before the end of your probationary period
• Participate & contribute to global Design & Experimentation calls,  Educate! to learn the program models of other countries. Learn from local field staff, experimentation, and referencing international research.
• Be knowledgeable of key trends, strategies, and language from the fields of design, education, leadership, and entrepreneurship
• Give & receive feedback from at least 1 other designer termly on their work

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree
• 3-5 years’ experience with a background in education and/or youth development. Demonstrated experience in designing teacher training programs, training and/or lesson plans. Previous work experience with an NGO is a plus.
• Strong writing and editing skills in MS Word and PPT; Attention to detail
• Familiarity with assessments in educational settings; instructional design skills
• Coaching; Giving constructive feedback; strong interpersonal and leadership skills
• Versatile and adaptable to rapid and dynamic change
• Fits our Five Cultural Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here

Terms

• Based on our growing office in Kigali
• Must enjoy writing and design since a lot of time will be spent in designing teacher training programs.
• 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!

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.

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