Radio Expansion Programme Manager 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 through randomised control trial to improve cognitive and socio-emotional skills and reduce malnutrition for 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. 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 have also scaled the programme through all rural communities in Mayuge District in Uganda.

In addition to our regular programme, we have leveraged the opportunity to reach an even larger number of rural parents through radio. During COVID, we developed a radio programme for rural parents, Lively Minds Together (LMT), which has now become a permanent fixture. LMT adapts our proven and tested content from the regular programme into very interactive and practical episodes for rural parents that supports them to provide learning and care at home.

About the role

We believe that the Lively Minds Together (LMT) Radio Programme could offer a cheap, impactful and highly scalable solution to the ECD crisis. However, we first want to prove and learn more about the impact through a rigorous evaluation. To do this, we plan to optimise the programme (maximising impact while reducing cost/effort), pilot in a new district in Uganda (to be determined) and conduct a randomised control trial (RCT).

If proven impactful, we plan to scale the radio programme in Uganda and elsewhere.

We are seeking a passionate, creative and versatile Radio Expansion Programme Manager who will be hands on in managing all aspects of the LMT programme optimisation, testing, pilot and RCT to high quality standards and in developing a well analysed strategy to expand to other locations in Uganda and elsewhere. This is a very exciting opportunity to get involved in all aspects of designing, implementing, testing and potentially scaling a radio programme that could make a real difference in the lives of millions of rural parents and their children.

We have already started developing our radio pilot and future expansion plan and working with a potential external evaluation team to design the RCT. You will help take this work to the next level and will be responsible for delivering it. In particular you will:

• Lead the optimisation and implementation of the radio pilot
• Manage the External Evaluators and ensure the RCT meets our goals/requirements
• Develop a detailed strategy/plan to scale the radio programme