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Position Overview

Educate!, a fast-growing nonprofit social enterprise, is looking for two External Relations Associates to join our ambitious, high-performing External Relations team. With geographic flexibility within East Africa, the External Relations Associates will help us meet and exceed our growth goals to fuel Educate!’s impact.

The ideal candidate should be happy to contribute in a supportive capacity to the team and will have an interest in building diverse institutional knowledge across the organization through varied projects.

A successful candidate should be a reliable self-starter with meticulous attention to detail and exceptional verbal and written communication skills, including some professional experience preparing content for internal and external audiences. However, the role is open to individuals with diverse experience and a variety of backgrounds.

The External Relations Associate will work closely with Educate!’s fundraising and communications teams, as well as program teams, to manage internal systems, develop high-quality content, and contribute to the ongoing management of stakeholder relationships.

While both roles have a dimension of communications and fundraising, the two roles will vary in the amount of time allocated towards each function.

The new External Relations Associates will join a motivated and passionate international team that is generating resources that will enable Educate! to positively impact young people across East Africa.

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

1) Fundraising

Within this role, you’ll work with Educate!’s fundraising and development team to ensure the organization meets and exceeds our obligations to current donors by keeping stakeholders informed on Educate!'s progress. Examples of potential projects include:

• Write and project manage grant reports and proposals, working closely with Educate! teams across countries to gather information needed for reporting and donor materials.
• Conduct field follow-ups and diligence requests from donors related to pending or submitted grant proposals.
• Research new funding and prospective leads and support in the documentation and ongoing project management of these relationships.
• Support the fundraising team in streamlining internal systems and processes to ensure grant reporting and compliance are effective and efficient.
• Contribute to Educate!’s fundraising and relationship-building strategy at conferences through prospect research, event preparation, and outreach support.

2) Communications

You’ll work closely with our communications team to shape and execute the organization's marketing and communications strategy, collaborating closely to produce content, manage and improve systems, and ensure consistent branding and messaging standards.

• Work with Educate!’s communications team to support messaging and branding initiatives, overseeing systems for documentation and disseminating messaging to ensure consistency across the organization.
• Manage a centralized dashboard for routine communications tasks with efficient coordination and execution.
• Ensure Educate!’s internal and external communication channels are up to date.
• Liaise with Educate!’s Communications Specialist to create compelling content, including impact stories, articles, blogs, social media posts, print publications, and email newsletters.
• Draft proposals for speaking engagements and content for external sources to drive Educate!’s key thought leadership messages.

3) General Support

Educate! is growing quickly and we don’t always know everything the coming years will

bring. We are looking for a team player who is happy to wear a variety of hats on Educate!’s External Relations Team, and tag in where there is a need. Some of the things we envision this role supporting include:

• Draft a wide variety of internal and external communications to support Educate!’s fundraising and communications efforts.
• Conduct donor research and/or sector research to inform Educate!’s development strategy.
• Support Educate!’s executive team’s attendance at a variety of special events.
• Troubleshoot and project manage tasks aimed at improving efficiency and coordination on Educate!’s wider External Relations Team, such as building or refining existing fundraising, communications, or compliance processes.
• Build internal expertise on specific aspects of Educate!'s work.

Qualifications

This position is well-suited for those with 2-3 years of work experience. The ideal

candidate is/has:

• Strong project-management skills with exceptional attention to detail.
• Trustworthy, reliable, and responsive to changing priorities and workflows.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills; experience drafting content for both internal and external stakeholders and tailoring communications for a variety of different audiences and purposes.
• A collaborative and adaptable team player with strong EQ and interpersonal skills.
• Comfortable tackling ambiguous projects and working across teams and functions.
• Strong organization and time management skills, with experience operating alongside remote teams and teams dispersed across time zones.
• A self-starter who takes initiative, can prioritize and manage multiple assignments, and work independently to meet deadlines.

Terms

• The External Relations Associate (s) are full-time positions. A minimum two-year commitment is requested to best meet potential professional growth at Educate!.
• The roles will be based in East Africa, with preferences for Kampala, Uganda and Nairobi, Kenya.
• Willingness and availability to travel throughout East Africa to Educate! offices and regional events, as needed.

Application Deadline 29th Feb 2024.

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, 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.