Project Lead / Project Manager, EdTech – Central Square Foundation

Founded in 2012, Central Square Foundation is a non-profit philanthropic foundation working with the vision of ensuring quality school education for all children in India. We are driven by our mission to transform the school education system with a focus on improving the learning outcomes of children, especially from low-income communities.

We believe that effective foundational learning is essential for better learning outcomes for all children in school. Development of foundational literacy and numeracy skills by Class 3 can help children progress to higher levels of learning which is an essential building block for creating equal access to opportunities needed for leading a better life.

In order to achieve this, we partner with individuals and social impact organizations to bring innovative solutions in education, as well as work with the government to drive systemic impact. We also collaborate with the ecosystem to leverage knowledge and create proven tools around critical issues such as early learning, technology in education, classroom instruction methods and governance.

Position Summary

One of the key areas of CSF’s work is EdTech (Education Technology). Under this thematic area, we focus on how technology can be leveraged to improve the teaching-learning experience within classrooms and at homes – through both student-focussed and teacher[1]directed interventions for low-income contexts. Our goal is to leverage technology to improve foundational learning in primary grades and provide remediation support in middle school.

We do this by funding the creation of public goods to improve the quality of the supply, providing grants to build capacity of early-stage organizations that cater to the target population, building evidence on the efficacy of different EdTech solutions to understand what works and what doesn’t, through government test beds and by driving innovation within government systems by reforming public policy advocacy and strengthening government capacity to enable sustainable large-scale adoption.

The Project Lead / Project Manager, EdTech will be responsible for driving the evidence generation agenda for EdTech. With very limited knowledge in the ecosystem on successful EdTech models driving student learning, one of the core goals for the team is to plug for this lack of evidence. It is imperative to identify promising hypotheses and build rigorous evidence around these different EdTech models, particularly for the low-income context. The PL / PM will have to develop and manage relationships with multiple stakeholders including researchers, grantee organisations, implementation partners or any other organization CSF may support to conceptualize and execute on programs/projects that can enable the creation of knowledge around EdTech in India. The Project Lead / Project Manager, EdTech role directly reports to the Senior Project Lead, EdTech.

Key responsibilities include, but not limited to

● Support the growing EdTech portfolio to build rigorous evidence around different models of implementation

● Identify innovative hypotheses based on current and future trends in EdTech and build a pipeline of potential solutions for evaluation

● Manage implementation/evaluations for portfolio partners end-to-end, i.e. from design to execution and reporting phases.

● Support partner/grantee organizations in conceptualizing and designing programs for implementation

● Ensure delivery on outcomes by partner/grantee organizations as per mutually agreed goals

● Create knowledge products such as advocacy notes, handbook to share best practices and results from evaluations to inform the ecosystem

● Promote coordination and cumulative learning among internal and external teams demonstrating best practices in specific areas of education

Required Qualifications,

Skills and Abilities

● Masters or equivalent degree required (background in Education, Public Policy or Business)

● 5 – 8 years (PL) / 3 – 5 years (PM) of experience with exposure to the education / EdTech sector, especially in monitoring and evaluation roles

● Excellent project management skills and communication skills

● Demonstrated ability to build & manage relationships with multiple stakeholders

● An understanding of statistical techniques and research methodologies used in the social sciences is good to have

Desired Qualities

● Entrepreneurial spirit, self-starter with a ‘can-do’ attitude

● Operating style suited to working with internal and external teams where teamwork, collaboration and resourcefulness are highly valued

● Excellent leadership skills, including ability to manage multiple projects at a time

Compensation

Remuneration will be competitive with Indian philanthropy pay scales and will depend upon the candidate’s experience levels.

Apply Interested candidates can send their CVs to anvita@centralsquarefoundation.org and sneha@centralsquarefoundation.org