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 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 1000 communities in rural Ghana and Uganda. 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.
We’re an 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, take a look at the videos about our programme https://www.livelyminds.org/videos
About the role
Reporting directly to our COO the postholder will be at the forefront of leading our organisation through this exciting phase of growth and will serve as the right hand of the COO in driving operational excellence organisation wide. We have recently grown our team from 45 to nearly 100 FTEs. We are developing new systems and processes to ensure that our government partners are able to deliver to quality standards at scale, and our staff are enabled to provide them with high-quality technical support.
Over the last year the Lively Minds programme has been compiled into a ‘playbook’ the bible of how to implement the programme from end to end, one of the postholders key responsibilities will be to own the maintenance of this playbook, keeping it up to date as changes and refinements are made, with the postholders input, to the way we implement.
How to apply
If this sounds like you, please download an application form on our website www.livelyminds.org/jobs and submit your completed application form and together with your CV to [email protected] by 11:59pm GMT on Thursday 12th 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.