Grants Management Associate at Educate!

Details:

Position Overview:

Educate!, a fast-growing nonprofit social enterprise, is looking for a Grants Management Associate to join its ambitious, high-performing team.

To fuel Educate!’s rapid scale-up across East Africa, we are working diligently to grow our sources of revenue and build new, large-scale funding partnerships. With this growth comes increasingly complex grant reporting, compliance, and project management requirements to ensure we are meeting and exceeding our commitments to funders.

We are looking for a self-starter and critical thinker with meticulous attention to detail, exceptional communication skills, and a flexible, can-do attitude. The Grants Management Associate will play a crucial role in bridging the gap between the External Relations team and the program implementing teams in Kenya, helping us to manage complex grants, source critical information, proactively identify gaps in our compliance and project management processes and propose solutions. You will also have the opportunity to engage directly with some of Educate!’s donors and partners by helping to design and execute site visits in Kenya.

Past experience working in fundraising or grants management or fundraising is not necessary for this role. Rather, we are looking for someone who is excited to work in a fast-paced environment and eager for opportunities to learn and grow with the organization as it evolves. You’ll join a motivated, passionate, overachieving international team that is positioning Educate! to be the leader in skills-based secondary education in Africa and intensively impact one million youth each year by 2024.

Performance Objectives:

• Grant Reports
  • You’ll work with our fundraising team to ensure that Educate! meets and exceeds our obligations to donors by producing high-quality, timely grant reports that keep our stakeholders informed and connected to Educate!'s progress and mission.
  • Write and project manage high-quality grant reports and other donor materials.
  • Collaborate closely with in-country teams to gather information needed for reporting and donor materials.
  • Support the team in streamlining systems and processes to make grant reporting and information sourcing more efficient, such as developing a tool to systematize and calendarize our story-gathering and info-sourcing needs for grant reports.
• Grant Compliance
  • As Educate! grows, we have increasingly complex reporting and compliance obligations to funders to ensure we are achieving our key deliverables and following through on our commitments. In this role, you will:
  • Maintain and update our internal Grant Compliance Dashboard that is used to track programmatic, financial and administrative deliverables that have been promised to funders.
  • Work closely with the Grants & Compliance Specialist to coordinate and carry out grant compliance processes, including meeting with department heads to check in on compliance items and identify any gaps, and following up on any issues raised during meetings.
  • Improve our compliance processes by collaborating with the Grants & Compliance Specialist to build out a strategy for addressing and following up on compliance gaps, and maintaining an annual list of milestones to be shared with funders.
• Donor & Partner Visits
  • 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 work with the External Relations Manager to:
  • Design, coordinate, and prepare for donor and partner visits in Kenya to ensure that programmed activities run smoothly
  • 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
• Team Support
  • Educate! is growing, but we still embrace our start-up culture! As part of the Team, you’ll support colleagues in the U.S. and in Africa on fundraising and other external relations projects as needed. Example projects include:
  • Supporting the fundraising team in testing new innovations to our grants management systems and processes, such as automating our grant pipeline.
  • Supporting the Kenya and other in-country teams with external-facing projects, such as conferences, student business club competitions, or key stakeholder meetings.
  • Providing trainings to in-country teams on Educate!’s key messaging, relationship management, donor visits, and more.

Who we are looking for:

This is an early-career role, well-suited to those with 2-3 years of work experience.

The ideal candidate will be:

• Highly organized and detail-oriented.
• Comfortable with the idea of managing complex projects with many moving pieces.
• A self-starter, able to prioritize and manage multiple assignments, take initiative, and work independently, with a manager based in Kampala.
• A collaborative and flexible team player, excited to learn and pitch in where needed.
• An exceptional communicator in diverse settings, from a classroom to a conference room.
• Strong relationship-builder and able to hold his or her own with key external stakeholders, from donors to government partners.
• Past experience working in fundraising or grants management is not necessary for this role. We are looking for candidates who have experience applying the skill-sets identified above in any industry and who are strongly aligned with our five cultural tenets.

And we’re also requiring for this position:

• Bachelor’s degree (related area not necessary)
• Kenyan nationality
• Minimum committment of one (1) year, with a preference for those willing to stay longer.
• 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:

Located in Nairobi, Kenya working alongside our rockstar Kenya and regional teams.

Benefits & perks include a generous vacation policy, health insurance, and breakfast in the office!

Why You Will Brag About Working At Educate!

We’ve got the impact.

Educate! is designed for scale. We have grown more than 10x since 2014 from 54 to over 700 schools served. We carefully measure our outcomes, and—here’s the best part—we are maintaining quality at four times the size.

We believe in local leadership — 99% of our on-the-ground staff is African.

Our model has gone nationwide in Uganda: we are now implementing the Educate! Experience in all five regions of the country, intensively impacting more than 28,000 youth and reaching hundreds of thousands more broadly through Educate!-trained teachers and our national reform efforts.

Educate is a well-oiled learning machine. We built our model by methodically testing hundreds of assumptions and we are constantly experimenting, evaluating, and improving.

We’re honored to have been recognized by key global thought leaders and publications, including Bill Gates, the Brookings Institution, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.