Grants Finance Manager

In this role, you will have a chance to engage directly with some of Educate!'s most critical funders and partners, work closely with the C-Suite level within Educate!, engage closely with our External Relations team and with the teams who implement our programs on the ground.

• Minimum Qualification: Bachelor
• Experience Level: Senior level
• Experience Length: 5 years

Job Description

Project Management: Fundraising, East Africa based

Position Overview: Educate!, a fast-growing and award-winning social enterprise, is seeking a qualified and passionate Grants Finance Manager to join our ambitious and high-performing External Relations Team.

Based in East Africa, the Grants and Finance Manager will help us meet and exceed our goals by creating budgets, budget processes, reporting, and owning compliance for the entire team. Reporting to the US Country Director, this position will play a key role in improving all Grants Finance systems and processes.

We are looking for an exceptional project manager who is comfortable working with numbers, excel and has excellent budgeting skills.

You are the right fit for this role if you possess;

• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, are detail oriented and accountable.
• Ability to deliver results on multiple priorities simultaneously with excellent time management skills.
• Demonstrated ability to influence.
• Demonstrated financial acumen, good understanding of budgeting and budgeting processes.
• Experience in building and operationalizing systems and processes.

In this role, you will have a chance to engage directly with some of Educate!'s most critical funders and partners, work closely with the C-Suite level within Educate!, engage closely with our External Relations team and with the teams who implement our programs on the ground.

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.

About Educate!

Educate! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today's economy.

We tackle youth unemployment by partnering with schools and governments to reform what schools teach and how they teach it so that students in Africa have the skills to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs and drive development in their communities. Our model is delivered through practically-trained teachers and youth mentors. Educate!'s goal is to make this practical, skills-based model part of national education systems.

In 2019, we partnered with the government to pilot in 60+ schools in Kenya, worked in 275+ secondary schools in Rwanda, and 800+ schools in Uganda (25% of the country), reaching over 46,000 students intensively and 470,000 more broadly. Two rigorous external evaluations, including a randomized controlled trial, found that towards the end of secondary school, our program participants earn nearly DOUBLE the income of their peers.

A follow-up RCT found that four years later, our graduates demonstrate large and durable shifts in skills, coupled with significant improvements in education and gender equity-related outcomes. Girls achieve even greater results. Our graduates change their lives and their communities, such as Daniel who leveraged both his medical education and the transferable and business skills gained through Educate! to open a rural health clinic in his community employing two people and conducting about 350 checkups per month.

Educate! supports governments with integrating skills-based curriculum nationally. This includes partnering with Uganda's government to integrate curriculum and a student business club structure into Uganda's entrepreneurship course nationally and serving as a technical advisor to both Rwanda and Kenya on national education reforms.

Educate! is a non-profit social enterprise with 200 staff and 300 volunteer youth mentors. We have been backed by top foundations such as MasterCard, Big Bang Philanthropy, Mulago, Echoing Green, Ashoka and Global Innovation Fund. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize (and was featured in a video), a 2015 WISE Award, and was highlighted by Bill Gates, in the World Bank's S4YE's Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, Forbes 30 under 30, 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.

Educate!'s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year.

Performance Objectives

Grant Budgets & Reporting

You'll lead goal setting, maintain oversight, and ensure that Educate! meets and exceeds our obligations to funders by producing high-quality and transparent grant reports that keep our stakeholders informed and connected to Educate!'s progress and mission.

• Streamline systems and processes to make grant reporting and information sourcing more efficient.
• Work closely between departments and with in-country teams to ensure that all budgets are correctly categorized and set for reporting.
• Take proactive steps to ensure that timelines are followed.
• Ensure that the budget and reporting process is triggered and at a proper time.
• Run monthly stakeholder meetings with the Head of US Finance and Chief Finance Officer.
• Examining budgets and reports from a funder perspective ensures it meets the necessary criteria and can tell a story.
• Provide accurate and succinct updates to all stakeholders.

Compliance

• Design, manage, and continually update and improve compliance systems to ensure that grant requirements and milestones are effectively captured, shared with all relevant stakeholders.
• Review all new grant agreements: Ensure reporting commitments are feasible, suggest any necessary revisions before finalizing, and ensure all requirements are captured in our compliance system and shared with relevant departments/stakeholders.
• Lead annual process for setting new external milestones and targets and track all milestones/targets committed to.
• Coordinate and lead regular inter-departmental meetings as needed for compliance purposes, to ensure all relevant departments are aware of grant requirements (i.e. M&E, Programs)

Grant Compliance Process Improvements

• Simplification of reports to minimize mistakes and grow capacity as the number of funders increases.
• Creation of a more centralized system that can track errors and identify weak points in the process.
• Create and implement a system that manages final grant agreements to ensure all necessary data is being collected to report against grant milestones
• Creation and maintenance of a pipeline of areas of improvement.

Data

• Conduct research to support Educate!'s strategy for engaging with bilateral and multilateral funders.
• Source information from in-country team members and craft responses to answer funder or partner questions.
• Lead in-person or virtual informational meetings to share more about Educate!'s work with peers.
• Owning Educate!'s Salesforce Database
• Overseeing the members that input data into salesforce and ensuring there are no errors
• Exploration for additional uses of data on the External Relations Team

Qualifications

The ideal candidate will be:

• Highly organized, detail-oriented, and comfortable managing complex projects with many moving pieces
• Comfort with data, Proficient in Excel/Google Sheets, and working with numbers: We don't need a finance guru, but we do need someone who has a head for math and logic and enjoys this type of work.
• A self-starter, able to prioritize and manage multiple assignments, take initiative, and work independently

A Strong candidate would also possess some/many of the following characteristics:

• Bachelor's degree
• 3-5 years of work experience, preferably in the non-profit sector
• Experience working with funders preferred.
• Grant Reporting experience preferred.
• A good fit with our Five Cultural Tenets (see "What is Educate! About?" Below; learn more by looking at Educate!'s culture deck via the following link:http://www.experienceeducate.org/careers/#culturedeck.

Terms

• The preferred location for this full-time role is our Kampala office but we're open to the position being based in one of our other offices in East Africa, in either Nairobi or Kigali.
• 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 quadrupled operations in 2014, going from 54 to more than 200 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 - 97% of our on the ground staff is African.
• Our model has gone nationwide in Uganda - Educate!'s model is now incorporated into the national curriculum and exams, impacting thousands more students than we can reach directly.
• 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 that luminaries and leaders like Oliver Wonekha, the Ugandan Ambassador to the US, and Ann Veneman, a former Secretary of Agriculture and head of Unicef, believe in us enough to have joined our advisory board.

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!

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.

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