Human Resources Business Partner

Position Overview

Educate! is seeking a Human Resources Business Partner (HRBP) to support a fast-growing global team, with offices in East Africa, the USA and Europe (Netherlands, Spain and UK). This role reports to the Director of People and will collaborate closely with members of the executive and leadership teams, as well as the Head of People Programs and Engagement to cultivate high-performance across the organization. 

This is an exciting and enriching opportunity for an experienced HRBP who easily adapts in changing environments, is a strong coach to guide leadership team members in addressing employee personnel challenges, can bring clarity and confidence to teams in moments of change, and enjoys working on a diverse portfolio of projects. Your expertise will be pivotal in propelling Educate!’s work as our team grows to meet our impact targets, while maintaining our commitment to the growth and development of our team members as individuals.

About Educate! 

Africa has the world’s youngest and fastest-growing population. By 2035, the continent is poised to contribute more people to the global workforce each year than the rest of the world combined. 

At Educate!, we're obsessed with impact. We leverage iterative learning to build highly scalable youth employment solutions aimed at unlocking the potential of the world’s youngest continent. 

Educate! prepares youth in Africa learn, earn and thrive in today’s economy by: 

1. Introducing an employment-focused school subject into secondary; and, 
2. Delivering livelihood bootcamps for out-of-school youth, with a focus on marginalized rural girls and young women.

To date, more than 250,000 youth have been meaningfully impacted across Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya, and along the way, Educate! has become the largest youth employment and skills provider in East Africa.

Educate! is a team of over 250 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 their own organizations and 6 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,  #startsmall, Generation Unlimited, CIFF and Echidna Giving. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize and a 2015 WISE Award, and has been highlighted by the World Bank’s S4YE's Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, BBC, The Brookings Institution as one of 14 case studies on scaling education, and the Gates Foundation as a Goalkeepers Accelerator. In 2022, we received a catalytic investment from philanthropist Mackenzie Scott to scale our systems change work.

Educate!'s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year. By 2025, we aim to scale our annual reach by 4x and measurably impact over 400,000 new youth. 

Performance Objectives

Relationship Building

• Provide strategic guidance and tactical support to leadership team members of various departments, working across all of our global offices. This includes face-to-face, which may require travel from time to time, and remotely.
• Build and maintain healthy relationships with key stakeholders within your group and the larger organization.
• Coach and develop leaders and managers to improve their communication practices, hold team members accountable, have courageous (difficult) conversations, and inspire and influence their teams.

Change Management

• Proactive and hands-on project oversight of change management processes, often with a variety of stakeholders, that mitigates risks and anticipates and addresses areas of potential escalation. 
• Coaching leaders throughout the change process, including aspects such as project management of the change process, preparing communication materials, implementation, and collecting and integrating feedback.

Strategic Guidance 

• Work closely with leadership team members to address current and future talent needs, informing organizational design and succession planning.
• As needed, investigate workplace issues and work collaboratively with country-level HR Managers to address employee-related concerns and questions. 
• Understand organizational challenges and design or implement creative solutions with relevant stakeholders. 
• Share knowledge and insights with the wider people team to help shape best practices from a people perspective.
• Synthesize themes and observations to provide insights that contribute to the People Team’s overall understanding of the learning and development needs across the leadership and management levels.

Performance Management

• Work with the Director of People and Head of People Programs and Engagement to implement strategies to drive high performance and employee engagement.
• Promote positive employee relations in partnership with all members of the leadership team.
• Support leaders and managers in cultivating a high-performance culture, cultivating performance management experiences are effective and empowering.
• Coach leaders and managers to proactively identify underperformance and address it professionally and swiftly.
• Guide leaders and managers to develop and implement staff retention, career growth and professional development, feedback, and succession strategies for their teams.

Qualifications

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a multicultural environment.
• 8 years’ experience working in an administrative function, with 4 of those being in an HR role, HRBP experience is required.
• Extremely organized and able to thrive in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment, juggling multiple competing priorities and responsibilities.
• Skilled at coaching managers to be effective with their team members.
• Ability to help guide organizational design with the leadership team and develop associated communications and change management. 
• Adaptive and able to quickly switch or entirely change activities to meet team needs
• Very high attention to detail.
• Exceptional judgment in maintaining confidentiality of employee and candidate information
• Have a clear and confident communication style to manage stakeholder expectations and to bring stakeholders along in changes across the organization or team.
• Must be curious and seek to learn and improve whilst instilling solutions wherever appropriate
• Comfortable collaborating and building relationships across all levels of the organization, especially with executive stakeholders. 
• Aligned with our Five Cultural Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below) and learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here.

Location Details

• We prefer candidates based in East Africa (Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda). We welcome applicants from other locations, including the USA and Europe (Netherlands, Spain and UK).
• We have a hybrid work philosophy! Teammates work from our offices twice per week and attend monthly team socials and culture-building events. 
• International travel will be required occasionally. 

Terms

• Salary will be based on market factors and commensurate with experience.
• Benefits will align with the country of hire and typically include medical and travel insurance, flexibility on work hours and hybrid work, paid leave plus one week of office closure over the winter holidays, and more.

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 of their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey.

1. 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. 
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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 act as one team: We prioritize the organization's mission and goals over team or individual goals.
5. 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 Chief Executive Officer— 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. 

Child Safeguarding: Educate! is committed to child-safe/youth-safe recruitment, selection and screening. Our recruitment and selection procedures reflect our commitment to the safety and protection of children in our programs. The successful candidate will be required to provide a satisfactory Certificate of Good Conduct as a condition of employment. We reserve the right to decline to offer employment to an individual or terminate an employment contract with an employee that may pose a risk to children and youth.