Position Overview

Educate!, a fast-growing and award-winning social enterprise, is seeking a Financial Analysis to support our growth and scale as we work towards our organizational vision of measurably impacting millions of students across Africa each year.

Your primary role as the Financial Analyst is to support Educate’s financial health by assisting in planning and budgeting, integrated financial planning, management reporting, forecasting, and modeling in the effort to turn financial data into information and information into insight to advise strategic and operational decision processes. You will report to the CFO in service of building Educate!’s financial data analytics capacity and fostering a data-driven culture by designing and implementing financial analytic processes, and creating reports, systems, and projects to yield information and insights critical to key business decisions.

The right person for this role will be well-versed in financial modeling, forecasting, and analysis, and can apply this knowledge to various scenarios and business situations. You will be analytical and detail-oriented and can interpret complex financial data, identify trends and patterns, and draw conclusions that inform strategic decision-making.

Sound like you or someone you know? Read below, visit our careers page to learn more about Educate!,

About Educate!

By 2035, Africa will contribute more people to the workforce each year than the rest of the world combined. Educate! leverages an obsession with evidence and iterative learning to tackle one of our planet's greatest challenges — unlocking the potential of its youngest continent.

Educate! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. We've created a 100-hour experience that delivers the most essential skills youth need to transition to work, combining training, mentorship, and practical experience starting a business. We deliver this experience to youth in 3 ways: directly to schools, integrated into education systems, and through bootcamps for out-of-school youth.

All three delivery channels have been validated by several independent evaluations, and to date, more than 200,000 youth have been meaningfully impacted by this model across Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya. Along the way, Educate! has become the largest youth skills provider in East Africa.

Educate! is a team of over 210 largely African staff and 300 volunteer youth mentors. We prioritize building an engaging, fulfilling and growth oriented work environment. 50% of our top 30 leaders have been with us for over 5 years, 10+ alumni have started their own organizations and 6 current or former team members were Acumen Fund East Africa fellows.

We have been backed by top foundations such as Imaginable Futures, Big Bang Philanthropy, #startsmall, and Echidna Giving. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize and a 2015 WISE Award, and has been highlighted by the World Bank’s S4YE's Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, BBC, The Brookings Institution as one of 14 case studies on scaling education, and the Gates Foundation as a Goalkeepers Accelerator. In 2022, we received a catalytic investment from philanthropist Mackenzie Scott to scale our systems change work.

Educate!'s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year. By 2025, we aim to scale our annual reach by 4x and measurably impact over 400,000 new youth with the essential skills they need to succeed in life.

Performance Objectives

FP&A Systems Development 20%

• Serve as an internal expert on proposing, developing, enhancing and maintaining new primary financial data sources/systems used by teams at Educate!, i.e., Salesforce, Quickbooks, and any others
• Monitors key performance indicators in collaboration with product teams and overall organizational performance, to capture financial data against the identified key performance indicators
• Develop and maintain a scenario planning system for Educate!’s revenue and products that is aligned to product life cycle stages
• Partner with the CFO, IT and the broader organization to improve forecasting through automation and system optimization
• Builds peer network and stays abreast of new tools and techniques in the broader financial planning and analysis field

Financial Modelling 20%

• Be the project lead on all financial modeling activities
• Produce models to project long-term growth, accounting for factors that will impact performance
• Develops key financial data using visualization tools/dashboards that provide leadership and staff with access to data that is simple and easy to follow
• Cultivates a deep understanding of the ever-evolving systems, processes, and data upon which Educate! runs; and supports continuous efforts to improve financial data accuracy and quality.

Budget Systems Management 20%

• Support program and operations team’s budget development processes and budget reallocations; providing technical, analytical, and process support, and meeting the financial information needs of all teams throughout the year
• Lead a product facing monthly budget v. actual reporting system for senior management to facilitate decision making
• Evaluate previous budgets and collaborate with business unit leaders to build their annual budgets and forecasts.
• Supports the design and development of budgetary guidelines to optimize the budget processes

Grants Analyses and Reports 20%

• Manage multiple complex grant project specific reporting requirements and analyses by among others, creating automated reporting systems when grants are signed to ensure prompt and accurate reporting
• Collaborates alongside the External Relations team to help plan, manage, and provide analysis for complex grants

Analytics, Reports and Communication 20%

• Support Educate!’s reporting efforts with a focus on transformation of financial, product and grant data into key financial performance indicators, reports, and ad hoc analysis as needed, including: Bi-weekly/monthly/quarterly/annual relevant financial performance indicators by program, product, grant or region
• Communicate results and recommendations to the CFO and others in senior management that will lead to revenue generation, cost reduction and more efficient operations
• Develop dashboards and analyses for finance committee meetings

Qualifications

• Experience working in a company or organization that has experienced high growth – adopting new systems and structures as part of the growth.
• Comfortable working with data, numbers, and reports with basic budget management experience
• Strong orientation to team culture and cross-functional work
• Minimum of a Bachelor’s degree and 2+ years of work experience
• Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting, and/or a quantitative field such as Finance, Statistics, or Mathematics, preferred.
• 2+ years’ experience in management consulting, investment banking and/or quantitative or analytical roles.
• Ability to effectively multi-task; keen attention to detail and commitment to a quality work product.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication abilities; exceptional listening, written and verbal skills; a keen interest in storytelling with data.
• Strong combination of analytical prowess, technical proficiency, and business judgment; proven ability to analyze complex datasets to summarize and present concrete insights; proven ability to depict data (and the story the data tell) verbally and visually.
• High degree of proficiency in Excel (Sheets) and PowerPoint (Slides) required, knowledge of Salesforce and data visualization tools is a plus.
• Passionate about financial data and analytics.
• A good fit with our Five Cultural Tenets (see “What is Educate! About?” Below; learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here.

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.e their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey.

1. We put Youth First, Impact-Obsessed - We never forget that Educate! exists to impact youth. We are purpose-driven. We obsess over impact daily and if it doesn’t lead to impact, we want nothing to do with it. We prioritize interacting with and listening to youth. We design and manage the organization to ensure every dollar creates transformative experiences that youth value.
2. We Exceed Expectations - We take pride in going above and beyond to achieve the best results. When we know what needs to be done, we do it. We don’t wait to be asked and we don’t stop at what is asked of us. We look for solutions as much as we identify problems.
3. We Are Always Learning - We are committed to seeking and applying new knowledge and ideas. We stay open-minded. We know there is always another way and we are excited to learn about it. We continuously look for resources of all kinds from multiple disciplines. We try new things, experiment, grow, and improve. We invest in learning for ourselves and our teams.
4. We are One Team, Many Views - We say what we think while treating each other well. We believe that all people have the same inherent value and that diverse ideas and open dialogue fuel excellence. We constantly strive to create an environment where everyone can and does express themselves freely. We support and respect each other as people and colleagues.
5. We have the Startup Mindset - We will always keep innovating to grow our impact. We aspire to be game-changing. We never think “we have arrived” or “we’re done.” We question the status quo in our industry. We move fast and embrace change to move towards our long-term vision. We’re not afraid of failure. We interrogate anything that slows us down.

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.