Summary
Date Posted: Friday, April 21 2023, Base Salary: Not Disclosed

JOB DETAILS:

Position Overview
Educate!, a fast-growing nonprofit social enterprise, is looking for a Communications Specialist to join our ambitious, high-performing team. The ideal candidate will most likely have a background in journalism and be based in East Africa, preferably in Kampala, Kigali or Nairobi.
This individual will create compelling content, including impact stories, articles, blogs social media posts and graphics, to support Educate!’s thought leadership and fundraising strategy. The Communications Specialist will report to the Director of Marketing & Communications, playing a key role in linking the program and country teams in East Africa with the global communications and external relations function. You will also play an important role in building systems and processes for collating stories from the field.
We are looking for a self-starter with meticulous attention to detail, exceptional communication skills, native English proficiency, and advanced story-gathering, interviewing, writing, and editing skills. Ideally, you have several years of professional writing experience and can prepare compelling content for external audiences.

In this role, it will be helpful if you understand the three ideas driving Educate!’s growth:
Single-subject reform as the best way to reform secondary education: Educate!’s education reform model, which targets the reform of a single academic subject –in preference to overhauling all subjects at once.
Alternative Pathways: Educate!’s ambition to establish alternative pathways for youth who can’t access traditional secondary school.
Educate! as a game-changing organization, obsessed with impact and delivering the best possible service to the end user, as well as advancing gender equity and education to combat climate change.
You will work closely with Educate!’s teams in East Africa who implement our programs on the ground, and you’ll develop high-quality content, materials, and relationships 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.

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, towards the aim of addressing youth unemployment. As a disruptive, nonprofit social enterprise, our team leverages an obsession with evidence and entrepreneurial drive to tackle one of our planet's greatest challenges — unlocking the potential of its youngest continent.
Educate! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. 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: directly to schools, integrated into education systems, and through bootcamps for out-of-school youth.
All three delivery channels have been validated by several independent evaluations, and to date, more than 200,000 youth have been meaningfully impacted by this model across Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya. 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 such as Imaginable Futures, Big Bang Philanthropy, and Echidna Giving. 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 & 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. Our plan is to grow our annual impact 400% by 2025.

Performance Objectives
1. Create compelling content, including impact stories, articles, blogs, social media posts and graphics, to support Educate!’s thought leadership and fundraising strategy.
• Draft, edit and project manage collation of real-life case studies and success stories that provide evidence of Educate!’s impact.
• Suggest ideas for impact stories, social media posts, articles and blogs.
• Run our LinkedIn channel, including posting and analytics.

2. Build systems and processes for collating stories from the field.
• Work closely with in-country teams to develop and maintain effective communication plans for gathering the information needed for content creation.
• Develop relationships with Educate! program officers, youth leaders and mentors, as well as external stakeholders for the purpose of story gathering.
• Manage a database of impact stories and build a local network of photographers and videographers.

3. Become the link between program and country teams in East Africa and the global communications and external relations function.
1. Work with the Director of Marketing & Communications to create content/thought leadership material to advance our org-wide priorities.
2. Become an internal "expert" on specific products, solutions, or aspects of Educate!'s work that we can promote externally.
3. Coach colleagues in East Africa on best practice in communications and troubleshoot to develop solutions as they arise on projects and systems.

Qualifications
This position is well-suited for those with 8-10 years of communications experience. The ideal candidate will have:
1. Extremely strong written communication skills; comfort generating copy is a must.
2. Experience in digital communications is a big advantage, as is any experience in media creation.
3. An understanding of how to adapt and tailor communications, both written and verbal, for a variety of different audiences and purposes.
4. The ability to review, summarize and present a high volume of information quickly and accurately with advanced structuring, writing and editing skills.
5. Strong verbal communication skills, project management, and social judgment for cultivating relationships with colleagues in program and country teams, external stakeholders and young people.
6. Passion and interest in youth development.
7. Excellent organization and time management skills; experience working with a remote team to successfully manage multiple projects with competing timelines.
8. High degree of proficiency working in a fast-paced, flexible, goal-oriented environment, with the highest level of personal and professional integrity.
9. A self-starter, able to prioritize and manage multiple assignments and competing projects, take initiative, and work independently to a deadline.
10. Willing to travel around East Africa up to once every two months to report on Educate!’s programs.

We’re also requiring for this position:
• Degree in a related area
• Bachelor’s Native proficiency in spoken and written English
• Fits our Five Cultural Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here


Work Hours: 8

Experience in Months: 96

Level of Education: Bachelor Degree

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