Position Overview
Educate!, a fast-growing and award-winning social enterprise, is looking for an Oosy Strategist for the OOSY (Out of School Youth) Solution Line who champions Educate!'s mission to create alternative education pathways for out-of-school youth. Embracing a product-led approach, this role ensures that our offerings prepare youth, especially young women in rural areas, with skills for quality self-employment in the informal economy. The role emphasizes impact, scalability, and collaboration with major stakeholders and huge bet-payer entities.
The Oosy Strategist plays a critical role in shaping and executing the strategy for our organization's solution lines and products. This role encompasses a wide range of responsibilities, including developing the Theory of Change, building exceptional user experiences, anticipating and mitigating risks, and leading the way in innovation. The Oosy Strategist is responsible for creating, maintaining, and adjusting solution-line-level strategies, overseeing multiple product management processes, and driving collaboration and alignment across products within the solution line. This role also involves advocating for product needs, fostering a culture of user-centricity, and monitoring product performance throughout their life cycles.
The right person for this role will:
● Deep understanding of the informal economy of East Africa. Experience in education, youth empowerment, or skill-building sectors.
● Dynamic, strategic thinker with a strong background in product development, particularly within the Out-of-School Youth (OOSY) sector.
● Passion for creating transformative experiences for youth, possess a blend of creative and analytical thinking and demonstrate a commitment to continuous learning and improvement
● Proven track record of strategic product development and scaling.
● Excelled in dynamic environments, proven track record of running experimentation, and capable of adapting strategies to meet evolving market and user needs.
● Ability to work collaboratively across diverse teams and adapt to changing priorities.
● Strong stakeholder engagement and partnership development skills.
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 to learn, earn, and thrive in today’s economy by:
- Introducing an employment-focused school subject into secondary; and,
- Delivering livelihood boot camps 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 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.
Key Performance Objectives:
The ideal person for this role will be comfortable with and excited to take on a role that is dynamic and evolving. The core function of this role will be taking on the out-of-school youth product strategy, and some of your key objectives will be to:
Strategic Development & Visioning
● Plan and oversee new site developments, ensuring they align with payer preferences and Educate!'s geographical expansion goals.
● Maximize youth reach within 12-18 months of new site initiation, ensuring efficient operations and significant impact.
● Engage in decision-making about potential future expansions outside current operational markets, depending on product maturity.
● Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design and refine products that are 80% stable with the capacity for 20% customization based on specific payer requirements.
● Position the OOSY solution line for potential 'big bet' deals, ensuring alignment with payer needs and specifications.
● Drive the evolution of the OOSY products to increase income boost and operating efficiency.
● Collaborate with product development teams to adapt successful interventions from one context to another, maximizing the overall product benefit.
● Ensure that the product offerings, whether residential or non-residential boot camps, align with payer price sensitivities and strategic focuses.
● Continually refine the OoSY strategy to achieve both reach and impact based on defined metrics, such as total youth impact and ROI in income generation.
● Drive the ongoing development of a user-centric culture across the organization, supported by process frameworks and responsive youth service systems to embed best practice user-centric behaviors
● As Educate! expands across countries, adapts the strategist’s responsibilities to manage increasing complexities. This could involve solely focusing on management tasks when overseeing products in four or more countries or specializing in specific features as products scale across countries.
Product Leadership
● Spearhead next product stage retreats, ensuring each impact unit has a strategist with a majority decision-making role.
● Handle and oversee both investment memos process related to impact units and business cases tied to the global product.
● Collaborate closely with the ultimate product owner, ensuring they are active participants in product-related retreats.
● Champion a culture of rigorous data decision-making, ensuring strategies are evidence-based and focused on end-users.
● Manage and mentor the OOSY solution line team, fostering a culture of innovation and alignment with Educate!'s overarching goals.
● Foster a culture of experimentation, encouraging the team to test new ideas, learn from outcomes, and iterate based on results.
● Promote a feedback loop system, ensuring lessons from experiments are shared and integrated into subsequent strategies and operations.
● Actively seek and create opportunities for pilots or smaller-scale tests that could provide insights for larger strategic decisions.
Product Development
● Set the product vision and strategy; own the product roadmap, ensuring prioritization of what matters most to achieve strategic goals and initiatives.
● Plan, review, and prioritize medium- and long-term goals for serving the new youth segment.
● Lead the product development process, collaborating closely with existing country leadership and implementation teams. ● Partner with the DPI to drive forward the product development strategy.
● Set product discovery and continuous validation strategies in alignment with product strategy.
● Lead the research and learning agenda for out-of-school youth products and coordinate the discovery process with the team.
● Oversee evaluations, ensuring the strategy adapts in response to product and impact data.
● Ensure the integration of behavior change insights into the learning agenda, which then informs program model development and iterations.
● Ensure the program's cost model aligns with the overall strategy and Educate!’s product investment framework.
● Identify and propose systems or structures for experimentation to create efficient delivery mechanisms.
Strategist and Impact Unit Collaboration
● Lead and oversee impact units in designated geographies, ensuring the global product strategy aligns with each geography’s specific context.
● Facilitate and manage all retreats for impact units as per the product stage.
● Collaborate with executives to identify where Strategists might be needed across various products, and shift roles as necessary to meet evolving requirements.
● Depending on complexity and scale, may lead up to two impact units.
● Ensure the product’s alignment and coherence across all impact units, despite the geographically diverse contexts.
Qualifications
● Dynamic experience is highly preferred, with a demonstrated ability to operate well in complex and fast-changing environments.
● The ideal candidate has worked in a very early-stage startup that was trying to achieve product-market fit or has led a new product or program within a larger organization.
● Familiarity with the lean startup approach is strongly preferred. You need to be open for future expansion.
● Interested in leveraging private and public partnerships to create a cost-effective, high-impact product
● Minimum eight years of work experience (more likely needed)
● Experience working with diverse stakeholders and managing many priorities
● Passion for Educate!’s mission is a must, but past work in education or youth development is not required. We value diverse perspectives and encourage applications from people with a variety of backgrounds. Background working with youth in the informal sector would be an asset.
● Fits our Five Cultural Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here
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, 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 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.
Safeguarding and Child Protection: 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.
