Scholarship Coordinator at Shining Hope For Communities

Job Overview:

SHOFCO is looking for a community-oriented, grass-roots based personnel to ensure that Kenya’s most vulnerable girls get the wraparound support they need to enroll, attend school and thrive. The role of the Scholarship Coordinator will be to run and manage SHOFCO’s scholarship program and support to drive re-enrolment in one of 5 target counties, serving as “boots on the ground” support to SHOFCO scholarship recipients. The Scholarship Coordinator will serve as the bridge between SHOFCO, schools, scholars and families to create strong and authentic relationships to ensure SHOFCO scholarship recipients are identified and comprehensively supported. The role will be embedded within SHOFCO’s SHOFCO Urban Network (SUN) approach to community organising, and ensure scholar identification and support remains strongly grass-roots based.

Key Roles and Responsibilities:

Build and Manage Strong Relationships with Scholar Support Ecosystem

• Liaise with SUN Committees to work with public school leadership (principals and Bursars) to support successful and efficient onboarding, and continuous scholarship recipient support
• Liaise with the SUN and Gender department to identify students who meet the eligibility criteria for support
• Collaborate with Scholarship Officer, SUN facilitators and Gender to deliver mentorship and school holiday programming, including leading on logistics planning
• Liaise with families and build their capacity to support scholar’s learning and well-being, ensuring they understand their role in the scholar’s mentorship
• Build strong relationships with local organizations and government institutions supporting vulnerable girls, including teen moms, to create and advance partnerships for recruitment and support of scholars

Spearhead Case Management and Scholar Welfare/wellbeing

• Implement scholar welfare/wellbeing and serve as mentor to scholarship recipients as necessary
• Continuously engage the parents/guardians and beneficiaries to ensure the students are enrolled in school, and are informed on any matters arising; Escalate any issues to the Scholarship Officer for action
• Identify and flag students at risk of dropping out or those in need of psychosocial support.
• Meet with new scholarship students and their families; to onboard them to scholarship programs and policies and ensure they are ready to report to school
• Partner with SUN committees on all of the above, working towards community ownership/accountability
• Escalate needed cases to Gender

Data Management & Support Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning

• Manage recruitment pipeline from various sources, collecting streamlined data in an organized manner
• Conduct data audit and maintain up-to-date scholar data.
• Ensure scholars submit necessary documents in a timely manner for continued support
• Support with all necessary data collection through home and school visits
• Plan home visits for scholars
• Maintain up-to-date Scholarship Database

Support Innovation

• Contribute to the department's ways of work and process evaluations to improve approaches to delivering the interventions.
• Provide insights as they arise to improve programmatic impact and efficiency

Required Skills:

• Psycho-social counselling
• Data manipulation, analysis and management
• Communication
• Partnership development
• Networking

Qualifications:

• At least 2 years of experience working in educational programs or community-based organizations supporting youth.
• Minimum Diploma-level education. A Bachelor’s degree is an advantage
• Certification in counselling
• Strong interpersonal skills with ability to build personal relationships with students, staff, local community leaders and members, school and government officials
• High sense of professionalism in performing duties.
• Dedicated, proactive, and results-driven.
• Detail oriented and well-organized
• Propensity to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic work environment.