Who We Are!
🌍 Africa has the world’s youngest and fastest-growing population. By 2035, the continent is poised to contribute more young 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 500,000 youth have been meaningfully impacted across Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Tanzania, and along the way, Educate! has become the largest youth employment and skills provider in East Africa.
Educate! is a team of over 300 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, Livelihood Impact Fund, Jack Dorsey’s #startsmall, 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.
Good to note: To Our Awesome Applicants! 🚀💫
We know that incredible candidates sometimes hesitate to apply if they don’t meet every requirement. If this role excites you, we encourage you to apply!
We’re looking for passionate individuals who believe in our mission and can bring unique perspectives to our team—not just those who check every box. We value diversity and strongly encourage women and individuals from all backgrounds to apply.
Position Overview
Educate! is becoming more data- and technology-driven, and the performance metrics function is central to that shift. This function tracks our monitoring metrics—both operational metrics that help implementation teams run programs well, and classic monitoring of whether we are doing the right things: activities, outputs, and near-term outcomes. It works alongside, and hands off cleanly to, a separate evaluation team that owns deeper impact and causal work.
This is a build role at a pivotal moment, and you will drive two important shifts: First, transforming our current Performance Metrics team, structures, and processes to become AI-native. Second, you will sit on a cross-functional team of senior leaders to implement our predictive analytics strategy, working in partnership with our evaluation, product, implementation, and tech teams.
As our most senior data leader, the Director of Data Analytics will design and own all four pillars of Educate!'s data function: data design, data engineering and infrastructure, analytics oversight, and data collection. You will operate as a "full-stack analyst" leader: technically fluent in SQL, dbt, and cloud warehousing, while acting as a people leader and a trusted cross-functional partner to Technology, Evaluation, and Product.
Expected Impact
The specific milestones below will be calibrated with the COO, but within this role's first year, we expect:
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First 6 months: You understand the current metrics landscape, team, and data stack, and have established the function's strategy and operating model alongside the COO. The team is structured and staffed as an AI-native team built to scale.
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By 12 months: Implementation, product, and leadership teams utilize self-service analytics for 90% of their data needs. The analytics engineering layer on BigQuery is healthy and fully owned, and the team actively utilizes AI-native practices. You are also overseeing data architecture in alignment with the predictive analytics strategy.
What You’ll Do🌟
Defining Vision and Structure for Performance Metrics Function
- Set the strategy, operating model, and priorities for the performance metrics function.
- Establish direction, standards, and expectations across the entire department.
- Build the function's capability: Establish team structures, develop streamlined processes, and build cross-functional forums to ensure best-in-class data systems—especially as our strategy shifts toward predictive and self-service analytics. Develop your leaders through targeted coaching, clear leveling frameworks, and cultivating a team culture of rigor and continuous learning.
- Build systems and standards that ensure metrics actively support implementation teams in managing day-to-day program execution.
- Maintain a clear boundary and clean handoff with the evaluation team, ensuring the two functions complement rather than duplicate each other's efforts.
- Partner with the central Tech team to ensure upstream pipelines meet necessary standards, and effectively direct the shared data engineer toward achieving those goals.
Data Engineering and Infrastructure - Build and own the technical foundation
- Design and own Educate!'s end-to-end data architecture, encompassing ingestion, warehousing, transformation, and delivery.
- Stand up a modern BI stack featuring self-serve reporting and automated pipelines that local country teams can readily utilize.
- Define the quality bar for the analytics engineering layer (dbt and the metrics layer on BigQuery) by ensuring accurate, complete, timely, consistent, valid, and traceable data, while holding your team accountable for maintaining that standard.
- Bring technical judgment to direct the work, assess quality (including the ability to challenge a data model or a pipeline), and execute effectively through your team.
Data Analytics Oversight - Turn data into decisions
- Collaborate with product, implementation, and performance metrics teams to define what gets measured and how-spanning operational metrics that support program implementation and classic monitoring of activities, outputs, and near-term outcomes.
- Establish a function deeply grounded in self-service analytics.
- Build the capability for the team to deploy multiple dashboards tailored to different audiences across the organization. Define and reinforce a collaborative process that scopes decisions at various levels and maps them to corresponding metrics.
- Ensure the performance metrics team transforms data into dashboards, insights, and decision tools that implementation, product, and leadership teams genuinely utilize.
- Raise data literacy across the organization to ensure teams actively champion and act on data rather than simply collecting it.
- Transition analysts from manual data analysis and reporting to focusing on the semantic layer of our data systems, ensuring it is optimized for AI. Similarly, usher in a shift from the performance metrics team providing manual analysis to a model of self-service analytics complemented by robust dashboards.
- Develop a strategy to improve frontline data usage in partnership with implementation teams, leveraging AI alongside both qualitative and quantitative data sources. The ultimate goal of this strategy is to ensure program implementation scales with consistency and quality.
Partner and Accelerate Analytics
- Act as the senior cross-functional partner to Tech, Evaluation, and Product, and a trusted advisor to the COO.
- Sponsor the function's contribution to the cross-functional data science workstream to help analytics move faster organization-wide.
- Champion shared tools, standards, and ways of working that lift the whole organization's analytical capability.
Who You Are 🦸♀️🦸♂️
- You bring around 7+ years in analytics, data, or M&E roles, including several years building and leading teams. You have managed managers, not only individual contributors.
- You have built or substantially grown a data or analytics team, and can speak to hiring, leveling, and developing analysts and engineers.
- You have genuine analytics-engineering depth: you reason fluently about data models, transformations, and a metrics layer, and you are comfortable with SQL, dbt-style workflows, and a warehouse like BigQuery enough to direct a data engineer and judge pipeline quality, even if you no longer code every day.
- You think in indicators, not just dashboards. You can make data accurate, complete, timely, consistent, valid, and traceable. You can also monitor that quality over time and understand the distinction between monitoring and evaluation.
- You get teams to act on data. You are an effective cross-functional partner and a clear communicator who can make technical trade-offs understandable to non-technical audiences, including executives.
- You are energized by the mission — improving learning, earning, and livelihood outcomes for youth across East Africa.
- Fits our Five Culture Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here
Non-Traditional Backgrounds Are Welcome
This role does not require a traditional M&E or non-profit background. We equally welcome strong analytics, data-science, or business-intelligence leaders from start-ups, social enterprises, or the private sector who can pick up the mission context quickly. What matters most is analytical depth, leadership ability, and sound judgment. If you bring those strengths from a different setting, we encourage you to apply.
What We Offer 
- A vibrant, mission-driven environment with a supportive and fun team.
- Flexibility — hybrid or fully remote work, depending on location.
- A competitive salary based on experience, with benefits aligned to your country of hire.
- Meaningful learning and growth opportunities as the function and organization scale.
Application Process: Rolling basis, interviews happening soon!
Terms
- A vibrant, mission-driven environment with a supportive and fun team.
- Competitive salary based on market factors and commensurate with experience.
- Benefits will align with the country of hire (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, or, Rwanda) and typically include medical and travel insurance, Learning & growth opportunities, flexibility on work hours when needed and hybrid work, paid leave plus one week of office closure over the December holidays, and more.
- African candidates strongly preferred.
- We will also consider applications from exceptional candidates based outside East Africa and the UK, where we do not have a physical office. For these candidates, the role will be remote and will involve substantial travel.
Our Culture & Tenets(Values) 🌱
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.
- We put Youth First, Impact-Obsessed - We are purpose-driven, focused on impact, and prioritize what truly matters. We listen to youth, design our efforts around their needs, and ensure every dollar creates transformative experiences they value.
- We Exceed Expectations - We take pride in going above and beyond to achieve the best results—proactively identifying problems and seeking solutions without waiting or stopping at what's requested.
- We Are Always Learning - We are committed to seeking and applying new knowledge and ideas. We stay open-minded and continuously try new things, experiment, grow, and improve. We invest in learning for ourselves and our teams.
- We are One Team, Many Views - We value all individuals, believe diverse ideas and open dialogue drive excellence, foster a supportive and respectful environment where everyone can freely express themselves. We work as one team and prioritize the organization's mission over personal or team interests.
- We have the Startup Mindset - We innovate relentlessly to grow our impact, we never think “we have arrived” or “we’re done.”We constantly challenge the status quo, embrace change, and move quickly toward our vision. Unafraid of failure, we question anything that hinders progress.
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.
We’re committed to ensuring all candidates are screened for child and youth safety. As part of the process, you’ll need to provide a Certificate of Good Conduct. Educate! reserves the right to withdraw employment offers if any risks to youth are identified.
