External Relations Manager - East Africa

Position Overview 

Educate!, a fast-growing nonprofit social enterprise, is looking for an External Relations Manager to join our ambitious, high-performing team. With geographic flexibility for the right candidate (with a preference for candidates either in East Africa) the External Relations Manager will help us meet and exceed our fundraising goals to fuel the growth of Educate!’s impact. 

This individual will create and edit compelling impact reports and partnership proposals, support the management of key external relationships, and be a critical member of Educate!’s multi-national fundraising team. The External Relations Manager reports to the Director of External Relations and is an externally-facing member of our team representing Educate! to funders and other key stakeholders. This individual will also play an important role internally by building and strengthening the fundraising systems and processes required to move Educate! towards its revenue goals, coaching teammates, and serving as a link between External Relations and other teams like Programs, Monitoring & Evaluation, and Finance. 

We are looking for a self-starter with meticulous attention to detail, exceptional communication skills and business-level English proficiency, and advanced structuring, writing, and editing skills. Experience living or working in Africa is a strong plus and our hope is that this individual will spend significant time (at least several weeks) with our teams in East Africa in their first year. Our ideal candidate will already have some professional writing experience and experience preparing compelling content for external audiences, but a variety of backgrounds would suit this role. 

In this role, you will have a chance to 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. Develop and manage grant reports, proposals, and other materials to communicate Educate!'s strategy and impact externally (50%)

You’ll work with our fundraising team to ensure that Educate! meets and exceeds our commitments to our funders by producing high-quality grant reports that keep our stakeholders informed on Educate!'s progress and mission. We envision this role will primarily be editing reports, while also frequently writing and creating new content for proposals and other materials to communicate Educate!’s strategy and impact externally. You will work collaboratively to develop comprehensive, engaging, and tailor-made proposals and reports to submit to prospective and current funders. 

• Draft, edit and project manage high-quality grant reports, collaborating with other team members primarily as an editor.
• Write, edit, and project manage high-quality grant proposals that are customized to address the key focus areas and requirements of prospective and current donors.
• Draft, edit and peer review a large number of internal and external communications as well as work to ensure consistent messaging and branding within the fundraising function as well as across Educate!’s teams.
• Work closely with in-country teams to develop and maintain effective 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.

2. Donor and Partner Visits (30%)

We’re building the reputation and support base to position Educate! as the leader in skills-based education in Africa, and that includes being able to effectively show our partners what our work looks like on the ground. In this role, you will:: 

• Design, coordinate, and prepare for donor and partner visits across our countries of operation to ensure that programmed activities run smoothly
• Support team to build, implement, and strengthen systems and tools to improve our visits across countries 
• Represent Educate! in person and over email to international donors and partners
• Lead engaging and informative site and field visits for international donors and partners visiting the program
• Ensure alignment between visit’s team and Educate!’s revenue strategy and relationship management process

3. Strategic projects and team support (20%)

Educate! is a fast-growing organization and we don’t know everything the coming years will bring. We are looking for a skilled generalist and team player who is happy to wear a variety of hats and tag in to support the team wherever there is a need. Some of the things we envision this role supporting include: 

• Continuously work to develop and build upon Educate!’s existing fundraising and relationship management systems, processes, and procedures to increase efficiency and move Educate! towards its revenue goals.
• Provide support to junior-level teammates to level-up writing and communications and take on more ownership of proposals and reports, and troubleshoot and develop solutions to any problems as they arise within our systems and workflows.
• Build relationships with other Educate! teams and become an internal "expert" on specific products, solutions, or aspects of Educate!'s work.

Qualifications 

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

• Extremely strong written communication skills; experience editing and preparing engaging and nuanced content for external stakeholders.
• An understanding of how to adapt and tailor communications, both written and verbal, for a variety of different audiences and purposes.
• The ability to review, summarize and present a high volume of information quickly and accurately with advanced structuring, writing and editing skills.
• Strong verbal communication skills, including public speaking and project management/ team coordination, and social judgment for cultivating new and existing relationships with prospective donors and organizational partners.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, able to collaborate effectively on a wide variety of tasks and projects across teams with colleagues at all levels.
• 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 and competing projects, take initiative, and work independently to a deadline.

We’re also requiring for this position: 

• Bachelor’s degree (related area not necessary) 
• Business proficiency in spoken and written English 
• A good fit with our Five Cultural Tenets (see “What is Educate! About?” Below; learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here.

Terms 

• This is a full-time position. A minimum two-year commitment is requested to best meet potential professional growth at Educate! and team needs.
• Based in East Africa, with preferences in Kampla, Uganda and Nairobi, Kenya. Opportunities for regional travel on a regular basis.

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.

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, and our team keeps up.
5. We Exceed Expectations - We assume we can achieve the impossible because we already have, year after year. We want our staff to create their own challenges, ask the toughest questions, and dream scary big!