Grants & Report Writing Specialist At Educate!

Position Overview

Educate!, a fast-growing social enterprise, is looking for a Grants & Report Writing Specialist to join its ambitious, high-performing team. Based in Kampala or Nairobi, the Grants & Report Writing Specialist will help us meet and exceed our fundraising goals by creating compelling and engaging narrative reports and proposals that speak to the requirements of the grants in question 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, exceptional communication skills and advanced structuring, writing and editing skills. Someone with experience in preparing compelling content for donor engagement and grant funder stewardship.

In this role, you will have a chance to 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! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. We are a non-profit social enterprise with 150 staff and 300 volunteer youth mentors.

We tackle 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 attain further education, overcome gender inequities, 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.

Check out our COVID response page on our website to see how we’ve adapted to respond to school closures in East Africa in 2020.

In 2019, we partnered with the government to pilot in 60+ schools in Kenya, worked in 275+ secondary schools in Rwanda, and 800+ schools in Uganda (25% of the country), reaching over 46,000 students intensively and 470,000 more broadly. Two rigorous external evaluations, including a randomized controlled trial, found that towards the end of secondary school, our program participants earn nearly DOUBLE the income of their peers. A follow-up RCT found that four years later, our graduates demonstrate large and durable shifts in skills, coupled with significant improvements in education and gender equity-related outcomes. Girls achieve even greater results. Our graduates change their lives and their communities, such as Daniel who leveraged both his medical education and the transferable and business skills gained through Educate! to open a rural health clinic in his community employing two people and conducting about 350 checkups per month.

We have been backed by top foundations such as MasterCard, Big Bang Philanthropy, Mulago, Echoing Green, Ashoka, and Global Innovation Fund. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize (and was featured in a video), a 2015 WISE Award, and was highlighted by Bill Gates, in the World Bank’s S4YE’s Impact Portfolio, 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! was also selected by the UN’s Generation Unlimited as 1 of 20 innovative youth solutions.

Educate!’s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year.

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Performance Objectives

Grant Reports & Proposals

You’ll work with our fundraising team to ensure that Educate! meets and exceeds our obligations to current donors by producing high-quality grant reports that keep our stakeholders informed on Educate!’s progress and mission. In addition, you will work collaboratively to develop comprehensive, engaging and tailor-made proposals to submit to prospective and current funders.

• Write and project manage high-quality grant reports, collaborating with other team members as needed.
• Write and project manage high-quality grant proposals that are customized to address the key focus areas and requirements of prospective and current donors.
• Research and identify potential sources of foundation and corporate funding.
• Edit and peer review other colleagues projects

Project Management

You’ll work with our External Relations team to ensure that all grant project requirements, deadlines and schedules are on track. You’ll contribute to the development of Educate!, its processes and its projects that keep our stakeholders informed and connected to Educate!’s progress and mission.

• Plan and organize the completion of high-quality grant reports and proposals with other team members, while ensuring these projects are on time and within scope
• Work closely with in-country teams to maintain effective project communication plans for gathering information needed for reporting and donor materials
• Support the team in streamlining systems and processes to make grant reporting and information sourcing more efficient

Qualifications

This is well-suited for those with 3-5 years of work experience. The ideal candidate will be:

• Excellent organization and time management skills; experience working with a remote team to successfully manage multiple projects with competing timelines
• High degree of proficiency working in a fast-paced, flexible, goal-oriented environment, with the highest level of personal and professional integrity
• A self-starter, able to prioritize and manage multiple assignments, take initiative, and work independently to a deadline
• Able to produce engaging and credible content writing and an understanding of how to adapt for different audiences and purposes
• The ability to review, summarise and present a high volume of information quickly and accurately with advanced structuring, writing and editing skills

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
• You should be a fit for and be excited by our Five Cultural Tenets. These active values are core to the way we work at Educate!, from hiring to performance management and promotions for everyone from our front line mentors in the field to our Board members, and they inform how we make decisions on everything from highest level strategy to where we go for lunch—We encourage you to learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here

Terms

• The preferred location for this full-time role is our Kampala office, but we’re open to candidates who would want to be based in other East African offices. All nationalities are welcomed to apply
• Benefits & perks include a generous vacation policy and health insurance

Application deadline will be rolling with the goal to fill the position ASAP.

What Is Educate! About?

We’re ambitious. Are you? Educate! is growing fast, so new opportunities are opening up 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 grow their skills and advance their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey.

1. We Put Youth First – The youth we serve come first. Always. In everything. That means we wake up thinking of ways we can serve youth even better and get the highest impact out of every dollar that we spend. It means Educate! doesn’t own a single vehicle because we’d rather take the bus if it means one more student can participate. It means making every decision like the future depends on it — because if we get our way, it does.
2. We Are Always Learning – When you work at Educate!, educating yourself is part of your job too. We encourage every employee to find the best book on management; share the latest article on graphic design; bring in your favorite college mentor; or meet the researcher pushing the edge of the field. We are always thirsty for knowledge and love to share.
3. We Only Solve a Problem Once – We are allergic to band-aids, so we love the person who brings the new system to solve the problem for good, even problems we haven’t recognized yet.
4. We Are Flexible – We thrive on change — we’re driving it. We are growing every day, so we have to adapt quickly to meet new challenges.
5. We Exceed Expectations – We assume we can achieve the impossible because we already have, year after year. We want our staff to tackle challenges, ask the toughest questions, and dream scary big!

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.