Rwanda Managing Director – Educate!

Position Overview 

Educate!, a fast-growing non-profit social enterprise, is looking for a Rwanda Managing Director to drive our growth and scale in Rwanda as we work towards our organizational vision of measurably impacting 1 million students across Africa each year.

As the Rwanda Managing Director, you’ll be at the forefront of a talented and ambitious young team. You will lead the execution and creation of new strategies to lead the scaling of our programs in Rwanda. You will ensure we are building and experimenting with diverse systems to optimize our processes ensuring maximum efficiency and effectiveness as we scale.  In addition, you are responsible to lead, coach, inspire and build a passionate and results oriented team that will drive the realization of our ambition over the next few years.

You’ll also join a dynamic leadership team committed to organizational and professional growth. The right person will be a strong leader with 10+ years of dynamic experience and a proven track record of managing change internally.

About Educate! 

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.

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, participants of our program 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.

Educate! supports governments with integrating skills-based curriculum nationally. This includes partnering with Uganda’s government to integrate curriculum and a student business club structure into Uganda’s entrepreneurship course nationally and serving as a technical advisor to both Rwanda and Kenya on national education reforms.

Educate! is a non-profit social enterprise with 200 staff and 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 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

Lead strategy implementation to drive transformative impact 

• Ensure country-wide performance on strategic objectives across the organization
• Collaborate with management team to implement org-wide initiatives to ensure successful completion of top organization-wide objectives
• Clearly articulate Educate! Rwanda’s vision internally and manage changes in country activities to maintain strong team alignment and engagement

Lead country-wide operations to drive world-class team performance 

• Provide financial leadership to maintain a stringent environment of financial management and integrity
• Quickly address employee performance issues with a caring approach and an eye towards their improvement, while being comfortable exiting non-performers to drive highest quality team performance and growth
• Ensure tight financial management in line with Educate! culture
• Manage financial constraints strategically to optimize impact against cost and position Educate! to continue to accelerate growth year over year
• Exemplify clear and consistent communication to all levels of the organization
• Oversee strategic management of key risks facing the organization

Program Implementation Strategy & Evaluation 

• Responsible for planning, reviewing and prioritizing our mid and long term goals for program success.
• Set growth and staffing strategy in line with country 3-year objectives and revenue strategy.
• Oversee country evaluation strategy and ensure strategy responds to impact data.
• Identify and propose systems/structures for experimentation to create efficient delivery mechanisms.
• Oversee program implementation and ensure quality program implementation

Performance Management

• Build, lead and coach a highly results oriented team to deliver our goals
• Develop field team recruitment and training strategies to ensure high-quality deliverance and scalable cost model.
• Conduct performance management of coordinators and fair and accurate performance reviews for team.
• High-growth staffing strategy: coverage of gaps, career planning for star performers, developing rising leaders, pipelines, and ensuring training and coaching programs are in place.

Qualifications and Profile

• Dynamic experience highly preferred, with demonstrated ability to operate well in complex and fast-changing environments
• 8+ years work experience, with 5+ years of management and/or leadership experience
• Experience managing medium to large size teams and balancing multiple priorities
• Financial integrity and budget management experience
• 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 is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here

Terms 

• Compensation will be competitive and commensurate with experience
• Benefits include medical insurance
• This position will be based in Kigali

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 — 96% of our staff is African.
• Our model goes national. In 2012 Educate! partnered with Uganda’s government to integrate curriculum and a student business club structure into Uganda’s entrepreneurship course nationally, in 2015 we served as a technical advisor to Rwanda on its secondary education reform, and in 2016 we began serving as a technical advisor to Kenya on its national curriculum reform.
• 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 US 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.

Application deadline will be rolling, with the goal to fill position ASAP.

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