Position Overview

Educate!, a fast-growing social enterprise, is looking for a Grants and Partnerships Officer to join its ambitious, high-performing team. Based in Kampala, the Grants and Partnerships Officer will help us meet and exceed our fundraising goals by organizing engaging site visits for donors and partners, producing high-quality grant reports and proposals, and supporting our fundraising and East Africa teams to help us reach greater heights.

We are looking for a self-starter with meticulous attention to detail, excellent writing skills, and exceptional communication and relationship-building abilities. The Grants and Partnerships Officer is an early career position with high potential for professional growth and learning. In this role, you will have a chance to engage directly with some of Educate!’s most critical donors and partners, work closely with the East African teams who implement our programs on the ground, and develop compelling content and materials to showcase our impact to key stakeholders. You’ll join a motivated, passionate, overachieving international team that is positioning Educate! to be the leader in skills-based secondary education in Africa and intensively impact one million youth each year by 2024.

About Educate!

Educate! tackles 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 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.

Success At-A-Glance:

• Educate! has partnered with the governments of Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya to integrate key parts of our curriculum nationally.
• In 2019, we’re partnering with the government to pilot in 60+ schools in Kenya, working in 175+ secondary schools in Rwanda and 750+ schools in Uganda (25% of the country) reaching over 44,000 students intensively and 545,000 more broadly. Educate!’s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year.
• Our measured impact shows Educate! participants earn double the income of a control group towards the end of secondary school and created 64% more businesses. More on our commitment to results here.
• Our graduates change their lives and their communities, such as Lillian Aero who employs over 100 AIDS-affected women.
• We have been backed by top foundations such as the MasterCard Foundation, Big Bang Philanthropy, Mulago, Echoing Green, Ashoka, and Global Innovation Fund.
• Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize, a 2015 WISE Award, and was featured by Bill Gates, in 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!’s team includes 200 staff and 300 volunteer youth mentors. 90% of our staff and 100% of our Mentors are East African nationals.

Performance Objectives

Grant Reports

You’ll work with our fundraising team to ensure that Educate! meets and exceeds our obligations to donors by producing high-quality grant reports that keep our stakeholders informed and connected to Educate!’s progress and mission.

• Write and project manage high-quality grant reports, collaborating with other team members as needed.
• Work closely with in-country teams to gather information needed for reporting and donor materials.
• Support the team in streamlining systems and processes to make grant reporting and information sourcing more efficient.

Grant Proposals

We are always working to expand our donor base, and grant proposals are a critical step in the funding life-cycle. In this role, you will work with the fundraising team to develop comprehensive, engaging and tailor-made proposals to submit to prospective and current funders.

• Write and project manage high-quality grant proposals that are customized to address the key focus areas and requirements of prospective and current donors.
• Help field follow-up and diligence requests from donors related to pending or submitted grant proposals. 

Donor & Partner

Visits We’re building the reputation and support base to position Educate! as the leader in skills-based education in Africa, and that includes being able to effectively show our partners what our work looks like on the ground. In this role, you will work with the External Relations Manager to:

• Design, coordinate, and prepare for donor and partner visits in Uganda and Rwanda ensure that programmed activities run smoothly.
• Represent Educate! in person and over email to international donors and partners.
• Lead engaging and informative site and field visits for international donors and partners visiting the program.

Team Support

Educate! is growing, but we still embrace our start-up culture! As part of the Team, you’ll support colleagues in the U.S. and in Africa on fundraising and other external relations projects as needed. Example projects include:

• Conduct research to support Educate!’s strategy for engaging with bilateral and multilateral donors
• Source information from in-country team members and craft responses to answer donor or partner questions
• Lead in-person or virtual informational meetings to share more about Educate!’s work with peers

Qualifications

This is an early career role, well-suited for those with 1-2 years of work experience. The ideal candidate will be:

• A strong writer
• An exceptional communicator and relationship-builder in diverse settings, from a classroom to a conference room
• Highly organized, detail-oriented, and comfortable managing complex projects with many moving pieces
• A self-starter, able to prioritize and manage multiple assignments, take initiative, and work independently
• A collaborative and flexible team player, excited to learn and pitch in where needed
• Experienced with traveling or living abroad, especially in East Africa (helpful but not required)

And we’re also requiring for this position:

• Bachelor’s degree (related area not necessary)
• Native-level proficiency in spoken and written English
• Minimum commitment of one (1) year, with a preference for those willing to stay longer.
• A good fit with our Five Cultural Tenets (see “What is Educate! About?” Below; learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here.

Terms

• Located in Uganda, working alongside our rockstar Uganda and regional teams.
• Benefits & perks include a generous vacation policy, health insurance, and breakfast in the office!

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 — 97% of our on the ground staff is African.
• Our model has gone nationwide in Uganda — Educate!’s model is now incorporated into the national curriculum and exams, impacting 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.