Policy Design and Learning Specialist, Tanzania

Position Overview

Educate!, the largest youth skills service provider in East Africa is looking for a highly strategic and energized Policy Design and Learning Specialist, ideally with a background in education and drive to support educational reform while ensuring our programs create a lasting impact on students and youth. The ideal candidate has extensive experience in educational program design, advocacy, teacher training, communication and presentation, capacity building of government officials and education reforms. 

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

Education Reform Curriculum design - 30%

• Design Content for program and advocacy materials aligned with Government Education Reforms and based on end-user feedback. This would include but would not be limited to: 
  a) Draft Scope and sequence, syllabi, teachers and learners guide, Textbooks
  b) Teacher Training Curricula, Teacher Orientation frameworks, 
  c) Policy implementation guidelines for teachers & schools and assessment standards 
• Create, update and manage the design tracker to ensure all content team members deliver within stipulated timelines and design process flow. 
• Coordinate the end to end design process for the Education Systems Solutions department. 
• Drive Continuous improvement of Policies, Curricula, Technical Standards, and Frameworks through Government Engagement and Evidence-Based Practice. 
• Ensure ongoing enhancement of policy, curriculum, technical standards, and other frameworks based on feedback from government engagement and evidence-based practices. 
• Utilize the evidence generated to design materials and programs that have a tangible impact in the classroom, improving teaching and learning outcomes.

Business Studies Curriculum Development - 30%

• Design and develop Business Studies curriculum materials including lesson plans, textbooks, workbooks, and digital content aligned with the Tanzanian educational standards. 
• Write clear, concise, and engaging business studies content that facilitates practical learning and promotes student understanding and retention. Ensure materials are age-appropriate and culturally relevant. 
• Utilize instructional design principles to create materials that cater to various learning styles and abilities, ensuring inclusivity and accessibility. 
• Work closely with government subject matter experts, teachers, and other stakeholders to gather input and feedback on content requirements and effectiveness. 
• Create formative assessments (project based assessment) to evaluate student progress and comprehension of the Business Studies subject matter.

Government Workshop Design- 30%

• Lead the design of  innovative and high quality materials for all government engagement workshops, including strategy documents, workshop agendas, concept notes, facilitation guides, education system analyses, talking points for policymakers, benchmarking reports and policy briefs.
• Participate in and support the design and facilitation of government engagement workshops, such as multi-stakeholder dialogues, learning experiences and co-design workshops, to influence government policy. 
• Lead teams of designers in the production of high quality materials, typically in a team leadership of quality assurance role 
• Lead retrospective sessions post-workshops to assess what went well, what didn’t, and how future workshops can be improved. 
• Develop clear next steps and action plans from workshop outcomes to inform and enhance future designs and materials. 
• Establish a robust feedback loop to continually refine and elevate the quality and impact of materials and workshop designs. 
• Provide a leadership role in quality assurance, ensuring that all materials are thoroughly vetted and meet the highest standards of accuracy, clarity, and effectiveness.

Policy Hub Technical Support - 10%

• Provide expert technical support to the design of ongoing and upcoming education reform learning initiatives, in collaboration with government actors and other partners. 
• Work closely with the Policy Hub, contributing technical expertise to ensure that learning initiatives align with broader policy objectives and reform agendas. 
• Participate in and support the design of learning activities aimed at Development of policies that are informed by robust data and evidence, leading to more effective and sustainable education reforms. 
• Serve as a thought leader and technical support for evidence generation leading to the design of materials and programs that translate to  impact in the classroom.
• Collaborate with Government on live cycles of learning and  research that informs policy formulation and implementation
• Offer technical support in the evidence generation process, ensuring that data collection and analysis are rigorous, relevant, and useful for policy development. 
• Provide technical support to ensure that learning activities are structured to produce actionable data that can directly inform and shape policy decisions and reforms.

Qualifications

• User-centric: always thinking about the user experience, seeking the users voice in your product development process, and working with your users to build a responsive product that meets them at their point of need
• Excited about influencing behavior change through developing strategies with government partners that lead to long-term behavior change
• Collaborative and astute communicator able to connect, communicate with and establish good working relationships with high level government counterparts, cross-functional teams across different levels of the organization and across geographies
• Decision maker: experience making decisions at a leadership level, getting buy-in and steering the teams you work with to implement them
• Expertise with flexibility: able to balance their expertise with a willingness to consider alternative perspectives and approaches to problem-solving.
• Fits our Five Cultural Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here 

Terms 

• The location is in Tanzania. 

What you need to know?

• As a technical expert in education reform, you will work with product strategists to lead initiatives focused on teacher behavior change and policy change.

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.