About the job
Position Overview
Educate! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. We tackle youth unemployment by partnering with youth, schools, and governments to design and deliver solutions that equip young people in Africa with the skills to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs, and drive development in their communities. Our goal is to design skills-based, post-primary education and employment solutions that impact youth life outcomes sustainably and at scale.
We’ve created a 100-hour experience that delivers the most essential skills youth need to transition to work, combining training, mentorship, and practical experience starting a business. We deliver this experience to youth in 3 ways (our three solution lines):
- School Solutions – We deliver workforce readiness, entrepreneurship, and 21st-century skills training directly in schools.
- Education System Solutions (ESS) – We partner with governments to support the integration of evidence-based skills education into national education systems and invest in the continued assessment of this approach.
- Out-of-School Youth – We’re creating industry-specific (agriculture, tourism) and group-specific (girls, literacy catch-up) bootcamps to equip out-of-school youth with the skills to successfully transition to quality employment.
Background
We are looking for an Assessment Consultant with expertise in Project-Based Assessment and learning assessment data use. The Consultant will support our Education System Solutions (ESS) work in Rwanda. We have already partnered with governments in Rwanda and Kenya to support skills-based curriculum reforms through our education system solutions, and results from a rigorous impact evaluation have shown that our cost-effective solutions create a real impact on youth through national education systems. The Consultant will work closely with the Group Strategist Scale, Sustainability, government advocacy experts, and our programs teams in Rwanda. The work will be geared towards developing approaches to scaling project-based assessment. This will include strategies for learning assessment data-use to inform decision-making on teaching, learning, and assessment interventions, as well as teacher professional development needs. These will support long-term changes to education systems and meaningful, sustainable curriculum and assessment reforms. About Educate! What if there was a way to measurably change the trajectory of the lives of youth across Africa? Since its launch in 2009, Educate! has worked to do just this, delivering outsized impacts at scale and at disproportionately low cost, through a product-led approach to youth development. As a disruptive, not-for-profit, social enterprise, our team leverages an obsession with evidence and entrepreneurial drive to tackle one our planet’s greatest challenges – unlocking the potential of its youngest continent. Educate!’s core model combines training in key skills with access to practical experience starting a business and mentorship, a formula that has been validated by several independent evaluations. This model is distributed through products targeting two lead channels. First, Educate! works with governments to help reform education systems at scale through policy change, teacher behavior change and tech-enabled products targeting systems-level sustainability, while also working directly with select schools. Second, Educate! builds employment-focused boot camps and business support services targeting out-of-school youth left out of the education system. To date, more than 200,000 youth have been meaningfully impacted by this model across Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya and along the way Educate! has become the largest youth skills provider in East Africa.
Educate! is a team of over 160 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 other organizations and 5 current or former team members were Acumen Fund East Africa fellows. We have been backed by top foundations and product leaders such as Imaginable Futures, Big Bang Philanthropy, Echoing Green, the 1st Google Employee’s foundation, the head of Google Search and Ripple works Foundation. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize and a 2015 WISE Award, and has been highlighted by Bill Gates, in the World Bank’s S4YE’s Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, BBC, 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 and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a Goalkeepers Accelerator. Educate!’s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year. Scope of Work We are looking for an experienced Consultant who will lead the work and deliver on the following:
- Desk research on scaling of project-based assessments by looking at assessment systems that promote project-based learning at the secondary school level
- Review pilot study findings on project-based assessment and offer insights, lead a process to draw out key insights and recommendations on approaches to scaling project-based assessment
- Desk research on learning assessment data-use for decision-making on teaching, learning, assessment, and education sector policy priorities.
- Develop a process that supports the team to work through and answer these questions with government partners:
- What decisions and actions could data generated through an assessment management information system inform?
- How can we build the capacity of system actors to identify the questions they can answer with this data, build the infrastructure for the system to analyze said data, and incentivize system actors at different levels to use that data to inform decisions?
With the above deliverables, we anticipate the following outputs within the mentioned timelines; No. Scope of deliverable Output Timeline Desk research on scaling of project-based assessments at secondary school level
Case studies on:
- Similar models on scaling of project-based assessment within public secondary school
- Key learnings and recommendations from attempts at scaling project-based assessment
JulyReview of findings from a pilot on project-based assessment implementation A detailed report with:
- Lead a process to draw out key insights and gaps emerging from the pilot
- Evidence-based recommendations on approaches to effective scaling of project-based assessment informed by the pilot
July – August Desk research on learning assessment data use for decision-making on teaching, learning, assessment, teacher professional development, and education sector priorities within the public education sector
Case studies
- From countries where learning assessment data has been used to varying levels of success
- Key insights on how learning assessment data has been used to inform decision-making at different levels of the education system and to inform teaching, learning, assessment practices and teacher professional development..
- This includes a clear process of the capacity-building efforts required to achieve the successful use of learning assessment data
July – AugustActionable process and strategies for learning assessment data-useDocumentation
- Guide with approaches to learning assessment data use by various system actors
- Clear recommendations for reports the platform can generate informed by learning assessment data with value proposition for each system actor who would use the reports
August
Qualifications And Experience
- A postgraduate degree in social sciences or development studies in international education
- Prior experience with and knowledge of qualitative and quantitative research methods and sampling strategies
- Proven experience in developing, assessing, and evaluating project-based assessment projects in education programs (preferably in schools within Eastern Africa/ sub-Saharan Africa)
- Proven track record of working on learning assessment data analysis/assessment tools with governments within Eastern Africa
- East African candidates are preferred but not essential
The total amount of duration shall be 2 – 4 Weeks. We envisage a ‘one team’ approach, with the consultant working closely with Educate!’s team. The Consultant will work remotely anywhere within Eastern Africa.Location and Time Zones
- Candidates based in East Africa are strongly encouraged to apply
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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.