Regional Education Technical Lead – Sub Sahara Africa

We have an exciting opportunity for a Regional Education Technical Lead to oversee education technical quality across our portfolio of projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. You will be responsible for ensuring that project technical delivery is of high quality and education interventions have an impact commensurate with our strong ambition in the region, in addition to meeting client and stakeholder needs.

You will be a champion for improving educational outcomes, with a track record of strengthening education systems and proven experience delivering impact on learning. You will be an effective thought-leader, able to position Education Development Trust as a leader in impact and innovation. Working closely with the Regional Programmes Director and as part of the Regional Senior Management Team, you will assist project teams focusing on education quality and data-driven improvements. You will also provide quality assurance for project outputs in close collaboration with education consultants and will oversee a team of Education Technical and Workstream leads, working on projects across the region.

If you have extensive relevant experience leading, managing, and technically designing education projects in the region; strong understanding of education system reform models; familiarity with adaption based on MEL evidence; and a strong desire to make impact at scale, we would like to speak with you.

The position will be based in any of our SSA offices in Ethiopia/Kenya/Rwanda/Zimbabwe, with frequent travel to the regional office in Nairobi, Kenya.

Job Objectives:

• Provide education technical leadership across the region, providing technical input to both existing projects and new project development.
• Be accountable for the quality of the technical outputs of the projects – including the monitoring and QA for project technical reports – both internal and client facing.
• Responsible for providing support for the enhanced use of data and MEL in programmes, working with MEL leads and overseeing activities undertaken by the MERL Lead, alongside close working with the central MEL team.
• Using adaptive programming approaches, ensure that programme MEL and research learning continually informs technical implementation of the programmes in the region (including links to the Delivery Excellence framework and support to programme Stocktakes)
• Provide hands-on support during the mobilisation/inception of projects, including review the design of the inception stage of the programmes, QA of implementation planning and ensure key learnings from the inception inform scale up.
• Build strong relationships with current and future clients in relation to education technical expertise and impact, working with supporting programme teams to do so.
• Provide regional thought leadership to support EDT being recognised as an innovative, evidence driven organisation with a deep understanding of education systems reform and the achievement of learning outcomes (working with Comms and BD teams)
• Build strong working relationships with key education technical staff across the organisation, including in programmes and the central R&C team (including TQAs); including running technical communities of practice.
• Support to the design and development of new programmes, including support to Business Development through technical input to solutions and quality assurance within proposals.