Deadline: 5 July 2023 Position: Director of Advocacy and Systemic Change

Job Description

Preschoolers in remote, hard-to-reach communities need better early childhood care and education now more than ever.

For this age group, investing in a qualified workforce and a formal pre-primary programme is the predominant ECD strategy. Although significant, this strategy falls short of providing a comprehensive answer. It does not support the full development and welfare of children and tends to prioritise “schooling” over learning. Additionally, this strategy needs a lot of manpower, infrastructure, and training, is expensive, and scales slowly, especially in remote areas.

In order to move the sector towards parent-run and community-run ECD solutions, marginalised rural parents are the answer to the ECD dilemma. 92% of parents have less than two years of primary school, but they can still help their kids flourish by giving them gentle guidance. Through raising parental knowledge, this strategy enhances holistic child development, parental welfare, and parental empowerment while stimulating demand for ECD services and bolstering current initiatives.

We are looking for a driven and innovative Advocacy and Systems Change Director who will broadly spread our knowledge and methods and have an impact on the worldwide ECD system, practises, and policies, benefiting millions of children and parents.

Summary of Details

About Lively Minds

Through better education and care, Lively Minds hopes to lower the risk of early marriage, early parenthood, and crime for more than 250 million children around the world. Through randomised control studies, its award-winning Early Childhood Development programme has been shown to enhance cognitive and socioemotional abilities and lower malnutrition in hard-to-reach areas. The programme gives underprivileged women the tools they need to manage play programmes that promote education and deliver better in-home care with inexpensive local resources. During COVID, Lively Minds also launched a radio show for parents that is now a regular occurrence. The programme, which has the potential to play a game-changing role in resolving the worldwide ECD epidemic, is affordable, highly scalable, and executed through partnerships with the government.

The Ghanaian government has approved the programme, and Lively Minds and the government of Ghana have formed a groundbreaking collaboration to enable institutionalisation, funding, and scaling to 60 education districts, impacting over 4000 communities and 1 million students. To comprehend its effects at scale, a distinguished multinational research team is presently conducting another randomised control trial. The organisation works hard, quickly, and in a difficult environment because it is ambitious and driven to have a positive impact on the world. They demand that each person give their all while pursuing innovation, accountability, growth, cooperation, creativity, and enjoyment.

Main Duties and Responsibilities

• Our strategy for advocating for change in systems has already begun. This will probably entail a) educating influential decision-makers and investors about our policy alternative. b) developing best practises and promoting the use of our concepts, methods, and approaches. You will be in charge of executing this plan after contributing to its refinement.
• Create compelling decks, opinion pieces, presentations, blogs, and submissions to display the programme and our learnings to the appropriate audience and key stakeholders. Disseminate our learnings, ideas, approaches, and evidence in these ways.
• Consolidate our connections with important senior global ECD stakeholders, and represent Lively Minds in meetings, roundtables, and other gatherings with important senior global ECD stakeholders
• Keep up with and participate in advances and research in the field of early childhood development, finding areas where we can provide our ideas and knowledge, and exchanging knowledge that could help us better our practises.
• Encourage the development of advocacy positions and goals by the government engagement teams in Ghana and Uganda when they attend meetings or working groups.
• Maintain close communication with our Monitoring & Evaluation team to convey the evidence we are producing.
• Collaborate together with our fundraising team to increase public knowledge of our company and brand.
• Develop a solid grasp of our processes and ways of doing things and present them to others.

Knowledge and Techniques

Essential Knowledge and Abilities

• Demonstrated expertise in creating and implementing advocacy strategies or enacting systemic change
• Familiarity with the ECD or closely related field’s policy, funding, and/or research community
• At least 7 years of policy or advocacy experience
• At least two years of experience as a team or function leader

Desirable Training and Competencies

• Doctorate in ECD or a closely linked discipline
• Professional experience in sub-Saharan Africa
• Knowledge of Ashoka system-change tools and techniques
• It would be ideal if you have prior experience working with a policy team, think tank, funder, or a bilateral or multilateral funder.

HOW TO APPLY:

If you fit this description, please email jobs@livelyminds.org by 11:59 p.m. GMT on July 5, 2023, with a copy of your resume and cover letter.

Please make the following mentions in the cover letter:

• Please share with us why you’d be a great fit for the position and how you meet the necessary behaviours, abilities, and experience.
• If you have expertise creating and implementing an advocacy plan or other relevant strategy, please give an example.

We are sorry, but due to resource limitations, we can only get back to shortlisted applicants.

Due to the stringent Child & Vulnerable Adult Protection Policy that Lively Minds follows, we conduct background checks on chosen applicants that include references and police checks to determine their fitness.

Inclusion, diversity, and equity are all priorities at Lively Minds. We accept applications from people from all origins and identities because we want this to be reflected in the variety of the people who work for us.