Head of Training At Lively Minds

About us

Our mission is to get preschool children in rural Africa school-ready. At present over 250 million children worldwide fail to receive the education and care they need in their early years which means they are less likely to do well in school, find gainful employment, and are at greater risk of early marriage, early parenthood and even criminality. Current approaches to solving this crisis are not proving effective or scalable in lower middle income countries.

That’s where Lively Minds comes in. We have developed an award-winning Early Childhood Development programme that has been proven to get pre-schoolers in hard-to-reach communities school-ready, so they have a greater chance of succeeding in school and in life. The programme provides marginalised Mothers with a parenting course that empowers them to run educational Play Schemes for pre-schoolers and to provide better home-based care, using cheap local resources. The programme is delivered through government partners, is cheap and highly scalable. It genuinely has the potential to play a transformative role in ending the global ECD crisis.

Over the past few years the Lively Minds programme has been delivered in over 350 communities in rural Ghana and Uganda reaching over 50,000 children. During COVID we launched a radio programme for parents and this is now reaching over 2million households each week. We are extremely proud that the Government of Ghana have now adopted the programme and we have a ground-breaking partnership with them to support them to institutionalise it, fund it and to scale it to 60 education districts, reaching over 4000 communities and 1million children. We see this partnership as the test case that will provide the blueprint to take the programme to scale in Uganda and elsewhere within the next 5 years.

About the role

The programme is delivered using a training of trainer’s approach, with Lively Minds staff training local government teams, who in turn train community-based trainers. In order to scale successfully, we need to ensure that government partners have the will and the skill to deliver the programme with fidelity and to quality standards. We therefore provide a standardised 2-year package of technical assistance (training, coaching, mentoring, tools) to government, with the expectation that after this period the programme will be embedded and government partners can sustain it themselves.

The postholder will be part of our senior management team and will be responsible for developing and implementing the technical support package. You will need to find creative, fun and effective ways to drive high performance and ensure the package is simple and cost-effective enough to scale. You will also need to build the capacity of the Lively Minds staff team to support them to provide technical assistance package to government partners.

The postholder will jointly line manage the Global L&D Coordinator to implement the Government Uptake strategy and capacity building for the local government teams.

We’re a lively ambitious organisation, determined to have a major positive impact on the world. We work hard, at a fast pace, in a challenging environment. We expect everyone to give their best to achieve the best possible results. Our work is demanding but provides plenty of opportunity for innovation, responsibility, growth, collaboration, creativity and fun. We want all staff to be happy, fulfilled and to feel appreciated and valued in their work.

To find out more about our programme, please visit www.livelminds.org