Head of Fundraising

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 to get 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. The programme is delivered through government partners, is cheap and highly scalable.

Over the past few years the Lively Minds programme has been delivered in over 1200 communities in rural Ghana and Uganda reaching over 120,000 children. During COVID we launched a radio programme for parents and this is now reaching over 2 million households each week. 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 1 million children. We see this partnership as the test case that will provide the blueprint to take the programme to scale in Uganda and elsewhere within the next 5 years, so that we can have a transformative role in tackling the global ECD crisis.

Lively Minds is a dynamic and fast-growing organisation. You’ll be part of 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. 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. You will be offered the opportunity to develop through targeted learning support which will include external learning opportunities.

About the role

This is a unique opportunity for an experienced and ambitious fundraising generalist to join a fun, high impact, mission driven organisation and to lead our fundraising function. This could be an ideal opportunity for someone looking to transition into their first leadership role.

We do not currently have a dedicated fundraiser and we are looking to appoint a Head of Fundraising to lead all aspects of our organisation’s fundraising and to grow and diversify our income portfolio. Our current annual budget is approximately £3m and we plan to grow this to £5m by 2025. The majority of our funding is currently from grants – mainly from innovation funders (including USAID-DIV, Global Innovation Fund, Grand Challenges Canada, Mulago Foundation) or ECD/education organisations (UNICEF, ELMA Philanthropies, Echidna Giving). We are looking for a Head of Fundraising who can diversify our income-streams and in particular build our unrestricted income to include a broader range of trusts and foundations, corporate support (particularly within operating countries) and institutional donors/development partners.