Lively Minds
About us
Our mission is to get preschool children in rural Africa school-ready. At present over 250 million children worldwide fail to receive the education and care they need in their early years which means they are less likely to do well in school, find gainful employment, and are at greater risk of early marriage, early parenthood and even criminality. Current approaches to solving this crisis are not proving effective or scalable in lower middle income countries.
That’s where Lively Minds comes in. We have developed an award-winning Early Childhood Development programme that has been proven through randomised control trial to improve cognitive and socio-emotional skills and reduce malnutrition for pre-schoolers in hard-to-reach communities school-ready, so they have a greater chance of succeeding in school and in life. The programme provides marginalised Mothers with a parenting course that empowers them to run educational Play Schemes for pre-schoolers and to provide better home-based care, using cheap local resources. In addition, we started a radio programme for parents during COVID and this has now become a permanent fixture. The programme is delivered through government partners, is cheap and highly scalable. It genuinely has the potential to play a transformative role in ending the global ECD crisis.
We are extremely proud that the Government of Ghana have now adopted the programme and we have a ground-breaking partnership with them to support them to institutionalise it, fund it and to scale it to 60 education districts, reaching over 4000 communities and 1million children. In addition, an award-winning international research team are conducting a further randomised control trial to help us understand its impacts at scale. We see this as the test case that will provide the blueprint to take the programme to scale it to a new country within the next few years.
We’re a lively ambitious organisation, determined to have a major positive impact on the world. We work hard, at a fast pace, in a challenging environment. We expect everyone to give their best to achieve the best possible results. Our work is demanding but provides plenty of opportunity for innovation, responsibility, growth, collaboration, creativity and fun. We want all staff to be happy, fulfilled and to feel appreciated and valued in their work.
To find out more about our programme, please visit www.livelyminds.org
About the role
We have a large library of content that has been proven to produce impact. The main focus for the postholder will be ensuring the content is scaled with quality and fidelity through government distribution systems, using a training of trainers approach. We provide a standardised 2-year package of technical assistance (training, coaching, mentoring, tools) to government implementing partners, with the expectation that after this period the programme will be embedded and government partners can sustain it themselves. The postholder will be responsible for optimising this process and content.
In addition, we are always seeking to improve our existing content to maximise impact and benefits and to support our sustainability strategy. And on top of this we also need to keep developing new radio content and parenting workshops.
The postholder will manage a small content team and will be responsible for both content creation/optimisation and for the development of the technical support package for government implementers.
How to apply
If this sounds like you, please download an application form from our website www.livelyminds.org/jobs and send your completed application form and together with your CV to [email protected] by 11:59pm GMT on Friday 13th January 2023.
Due to resource constraints, we apologise, but we will only respond to shortlisted candidates.
Lively Minds operates a strict Child & Vulnerable Adult Protection Policy, and we therefore check suitability of successful candidates though background checks consisting of references and police checks.
Lively Minds is fully committed to equity, diversity and inclusion. We want this to be reflected in the diversity of the people who work for us and we welcome applications from people from all backgrounds and identities.