Position Overview

Educate!, a fast-growing and award-winning social enterprise, is seeking an enthusiastic and self-driven Design Specialist to join our Kenya Team. The role requires a creative thinker with a passion for user-centered design, superb organizational and management skills, and a drive for constant learning and improvement. The Design Specialist will lead the SkillUp design team in building and continuously improving our product for Out of School youth(OoSY). In addition, he/she will oversee our innovation & learning systems as part of Educate!’s culture of impact-oriented program design based on learning and experimentation.

Educate! lives a culture of impact-oriented and iterative program design based on learning and experimentation. The Design Specialist will work with our design teams to develop content and materials to empower youth with entrepreneurship and work readiness skills.

The ideal candidate for this role is a highly strategic designer – with experience in program design or learning experience design, and educational program design - who is energized and driven to empower multiple teams ensuring our programs create a lasting impact on students and youth. You should also have extensive experience in hands-on, interactive, iterative and collaborative education design approaches in either formal high school education, youth development, or other adult learning contexts.

About Educate!

Africa has the world’s youngest and fastest-growing population. By 2035, the continent is poised to contribute more people to the global workforce each year than the rest of the world combined.

At Educate! we're obsessed with impact. We leverage iterative learning to build highly scalable youth employment solutions aimed at unlocking the potential of the world’s youngest continent.

Educate! prepares youth in Africa learn, earn and thrive in today’s economy by:

1) introducing an employment-focused school subject into secondary, and

2) delivering livelihood bootcamps for out-of-school youth, with a focus on marginalized rural girls and young women.

To date, more than 250,000 youth have been meaningfully impacted across Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya, and along the way, Educate! has become the largest youth employment and skills provider in East Africa.

Educate! is a team of over 250 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, Generation Unlimited, CIFF 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.

Performance Objectives

Curriculum content design and training

• Contribute to ideation and strategy: work collaboratively with various team members on program ideation, product strategy, design and implementation of training strategy.
• Contribute to program strategy and proposal development: i.e pre and post evaluation discussions and translation of impact results to support program strategy scoping and proposal development as informed by evaluation and impact results
• Lead design output development: Oversee, lead and guide the content team on all design outputs related to the Program, including but not limited to training guides, SMS lessons and schedules, as required for each level of training as informed by program strategy and end-user feedback.
• User discovery: work with strategist around design of our continuous user feedback process to inform new product designs for testing
• Timely content delivery and training: lead, manage and track the end-to-end content design process to ensure timely delivery. Lead training of trainers for various teams expected to deliver content designed.

Experiments and A/B prototype design

• Contribute to experimentation strategy: work with program leadership and teams on program experimentation strategy
• Program Experiments Design; Develop experiment hypotheses and indicators, define learning path and create data collection and analysis tools. Create experiment budgets.
• Develop experiments report and product iteration proposals for Design experiments: Lead documentation of experiment lessons, data analysis and develop experiments reports with clear proposals for product iterations to strengthen product quality.

Team leadership: Coach and support the design teams

• Lead the Design Team: Establish and maintain a strong, positive, and engaged team culture. Coach and support team to deliver quality designs & results in a timely way through providing continuous feedback loops and 1:1 conversations.
• Lead hiring of Design support Teams: Provide oversight of departmental designer needs, initiate and lead hiring processes for any additional designers needed on the team.
• Create and manage implementation of design work plans: Set the design periodic work plan and manage the team to design milestones. Review team drafts ensuring they meet product design principles and language.

Program learning strategy

• Coordinate Product learning Strategy and Agenda: Collaborate with different department leads to set and align on the learning agenda for the product. Set up periodic touch points to check the progress of the learning strategy implementation.
• Create learning tools and templates: Lead the creation of product strategy learning data collection tools and reporting templates.
• Analyze data to inform program design: Analyze data from the learning agenda, develop reports with recommendations to inform program design

Qualifications

• Experience in program development - either program, (user) experience or education design- or research & development for program 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 a passion for coaching team members
• A 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

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 of 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. We act as one team: We prioritize the organization's mission and goals over team or individual goals.
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.

Child Safeguarding: Educate! is committed to child-safe/youth-safe recruitment, selection and screening. Our recruitment and selection procedures reflect our commitment to the safety and protection of children in our programs. The successful candidate will be required to provide a satisfactory Certificate of Good Conduct as a condition of employment. We reserve the right to decline to offer employment to an individual or terminate an employment contract with an employee that may pose a risk to children and youth.