Jobs at Lively Minds

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 highquality technical support.
Main duties and responsibilities
Systems optimisation

• Our goal is for our team, located across multiple locations, to be a well-oiled machine at scale andable to expand operations to new countries. As such, we need streamlined, centralised internaloperating systems (I.e., finance, HR, IT) that can be customised for context and ultimately enable us to work together as a global team. This role will be responsible for supporting the COO and other Senior Management Team members to optimise our current operating systems and design, build and implement new systems.
• Support evaluation and optimisation of current internal operating systems
• Support design, development, testing and implementation of new internal operating systems
• Manage a log of internal operating systems, uptake, risks and lessons learned and ensure evaluation is translated into actionable improvements

Programme Operations and Quality Management

• The Lively Minds Programme is mainly delivered by government partners, with Lively Minds staff performing as master trainers and providing technical support to government (capacity-building training and coaching). We must ensure that delivery by both LM staff and government staff is to quality and that the right systems and tools are in place to support implementation excellence. This role will be responsible for supporting the COO and Implementation Teams to optimise the programme execution rhythm and quality assure the programme delivery.
• Support Country teams to develop termly implementation schedules
• Support Country teams to schedule workforce effectively using automated IT tools
• Ensure process maps for all programme activities are optimised and kept up to date
• Provide technical expertise to the COO and work with Head of M&E to develop and implement programme quality assurance and reporting systems and tool
• Ensure implementation action plans are kept up to date and support Country teams to
• maintain these, monitoring compliance and progress
• Maintain the risk register: ensure effective actions are put in place to manage risks
• Proactively identify risks in the operations of the programme in consultation with the COO and Country Directors and facilitate problem solving discussions.
• Provide training/coaching to Country teams on quality assurance systems.
• Monitor compliance to organizational policies and escalate compliance risks to COO and policy owners.
• Analyse processes in programme activities and look for opportunities to improve our systems and processes using data and in-depth analysis.

Other

•  May be asked to deputise for the COO or Country Director Ghana or other members of SMT at external events with key stakeholders.

To succeed in this role, you:
To succeed in this role, you will need….

•  to be an analytical and strategic thinker - with an irrepressible ability to see challenges as opportunities and to find creative solutions
•  to be a fast and self-driven learner – you will need to quickly get yourself up to speed with new ideas, approaches, best practices
• to work productively and produce excellent quality work with minimal supervision at pace
•  to be a leader - you will need to collaborate well with other team members, and to drive high performance in others

Technical abilities
Essential

•  Minimum of 3 years’ experience of operations management or change management
•  Excellent communication (English), both oral and written
•  Professional Project Management certification (i.e., Prince 2, Six Sigma, PMP, APM, PMQ)
•  Experience of analysing and reviewing data
•  Experience in creating user-friendly tools and processes to support project and quality management
•  Experience using Microsoft 365 package including Visio, PowerPoint, with advanced Excel skills
•  Tech savvy – ability to learn new tech tools efficiently
•  Experience coordinating others
•  Ability to manage a complex and varied work load and to work under pressure
•  Excellent interpersonal skills

Desirable

•  Experience designing internal operational systems (I.e. finance, HR, IT)
• a Experience of working in the global south

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Main duties and responsibilities
Strategic Development

•  Contribute to the global scale and sustainability strategy for Lively Minds.
•  Develop and implement plans to support the achievement of strategic goals.
•  Identify and drive forward strategies to support grassroots demand, and government motivation,uptake and sustainability strategies.

Curriculum optimisation

•  Lead the content team to develop engaging context-appropriate content, founded in behavioural science techniques, to improve the early childhood care and education provided to rural children.
• In particular, we are growing our bank of radio episodes and in-person workshops for parents.
•  Update the existing content and approaches to strengthen community engagement, inclusivity and ensure that programme activities and processes are optimised, so that burdens are minimised and tasks are simplified.
•  Own a database of all curriculum and materials, so that templates can be reused and lessons learnt and incorporated
•  Work with the Head of Monitoring & Evaluation and with external evaluators to develop ways to evaluate and communicate the programme’s impact and user experience
• Work with other team members to identify ways to improve the programme, curriculum, approaches, systems and practices to ensure it is as simple, scalable and user-focussed as possible.

“Government as doer” strategy

•  Build the technical skills of government trainers to deliver programme activities to high standards, by developing training content, coaching frameworks and tools (e.g. how to monitor, how coach and give feedback, problem solving).
•  Develop training and tools for government that will build their general ability to coordinate and project manage the programme (e.g. skills in work planning, SMART goals, data analysis, problem solving)
•  Analyse bottlenecks affecting the quality of delivery or sustainability and find creative scalable ways to raise performance levels of government implementers (e.g. normalising feedback and self-reflection, incentivising good behaviours, accountability measures for low performance)
•  Work with the Head of Monitoring & Evaluation and Country Directors to evaluate government uptake, capacity, motivation levels.
• Review and iterate strategy and approaches in response to feedback loops.

Implementation and training excellence

•  Develop strategies that support staff and government partners to facilitate training to the highest standard and to strengthen the cascade delivery model
•  Conduct field visits to supervise and observe the quality of training and work with COO and Country Directors to identify implementation challenges and risks, and create effective systems, tools, trainings, materials to improve quality of implementation, and specifically the cascade delivery approach.

Line management
 Line manage content team (currrent two curriculum specialists)

To succeed in this role, you:

•  Love to develop creative training and support materials (e.g manuals, guides, checklists) & understand how to make learning fun, easy and stickable
•  Understand how to get content scaled through a cascade system with quality and fidelity
•  Are able to deliver high-quality thoughtful work in a fast-pace environment
•  Are able to drive high performance in others by setting clear goals and expectations
• Are creative, proactive, and energetic
•  Are a team player that values and prioritises inclusivity

Technical abilities
Essential

•  Minimum of 3 years experience of creating a training curriculum and simple user-friendly tools and processes
•  Experience in overseeing effective delivery of content through a cascade
•  Excellent communication (English), both oral and written
•  Experience managing and coaching others
•  Proven ability to manage a complex and varied workload and to deliver at pace

Desirable

•  Behaviour-change, psychology and/or ECD experience
•  Project management or change management experience
•  Experience working in the global south

Please download an Application Form and send the completed form to [email protected] before the deadline

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​Main duties and responsibilities

•  Ensure the quality assurance of the data dashboards used to monitor programme progress and quality in real time. This includes conducting spotchecks and liaising with vendors to oversee updates and corrections to the dashboards.
•  Support Head of M&E in developing training for staff and government on monitoring systems
•  Liaising with colleagues in the Content and Implementation teams to ensure that input from the M&E team is of high quality and shared in a timely manner (e.g. updates to monitoring forms and analysis of programme data)
•  Supporting the M&E Assistant to resolve M&E-related requests made by colleagues to ensure that the M&E team delivers excellent ‘customer service’ to the wider organisation
•  Responsible for termly surveys of schools in, or about to join, the programme
•  Responsible for providing a termly summary of programme data to determine if implementing partners are implementing the programme to the required standard against key stage gate indicators

To succeed in this you, will be:

•  Be passionate about optimising data management and availability to drive programme quality
•  Have an aptitude for understanding complex data management systems and supporting colleagues to use these effectively
•  Take pride in constantly monitoring progress and results to iterate and get the best result
•  Be creative, proactive, and energetic: bringing new ideas and a can-do attitude to get to the very best sustainable results.
•  Be a team player that values and prioritises inclusivity: helping to create a positive work environment where everyone is motivated and feels able to participate, learn, improve and contribute

Experience and Skills
Essential experience and skills

•  3-5 years’ experience in M&E, IT or similar field
•  Excellent attention to detail: produces high-quality, accurate work in a timely manner
•  Excellent IT skills, including advanced Excel skills in data cleaning and analysis
•  Experience of working with mobile data collection tools such as KOBO, ClickMedix, ODK or similar, including creating and updating data collection forms and providing technical support to staff members using the forms to collect data.
•  Ability to manage and prioritise own workload with minimal supervison, whilst providing high quality ‘customer service’ to colleagues

Desirable experience and skills

•  Undergraduate degree (preferably in statistics, mathematics or IT)
•  Experience delivering training and building the capacity of others
•  Experience of working as part of a remote team
•  Experience of working in the early childhood development/education sector
•  Experience of delivering a programme alongside government partners

Please download an Application Form and send the completed form to [email protected] before the deadline.

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​Main duties and responsibilities
Transactional Recording & Reporting

•  Responsible for accurate financial transaction entry and record keeping, including balance sheet reconciliations;
•  Support the Director of Finance in preparing consolidated monthly, quarterly and annual reports to the Management Team and Board of Trustees to agreed deadlines;
•  Perform variance analysis against budgeted costs and communicate implications on forecasts and cash flow;
•  Provide information for annual audits, interacting and liaising with auditors;
•  Assist with processing payments within the organisation’s banking system;
•  Assist in the preparation of annual budgets and project reconciliations;
•  Support the Director of Finance to create budgets and develop tools to track and control expenditure;
•  Support the Director of Finance to coordinate the provision of information for feeding into financial proposals and reports for funders, ensuring mechanisms to track and report against restricted income are robust;
•  Support with other administrative duties as required such as data entry.

Financial Management

•  Ensure that Lively Minds financial systems, policies, procedures and internal controls and audits are robust, compliant and support current activities and future growth;
•  Ensure strict financial control policies are followed and conduct internal audit work to review adherance;
•  Work with the Director of Finance to ensure processes and controls are in place to overseethe day-to-day operation of financial systems and resources, including cash flow monitoring, bank reconciliations, invoicing, banking, payroll;
•  Support purchasing and procurement activities and ensure value for money.

Experience and skills
To succeed in this role you will need:

•  to be innovative and results driven. You will need to develop high-quality financial information based on a sound understanding of different stakeholders and their priorities and requirements. Though we have clear goals, we are constantly problem solving and coming up with new approaches and solutions.
•  to be a team player and a good communicator. You will need to work closely with our SMT, global team, in-country teams, and other stakeholders.
•  to be able to work to a high standard at pace. We have a very busy workload and tight deadlines. You need to be organised, proactive and have excellent attention to detail.
•  to be resilient, persistent and proactive. You must be comfortable working with limited supervision and managing a complex, varied and potentially challenging workload.

Technical abilities

• Essential
•  Minimum AAT Level 4 Qualification or Part-qualified ACA, ACCA, CIMA
•  Experienced user of Excel and comfortable with other Microsoft Office applications to communicate complex information to both finance and non-finance audiences
•  Experience delivering a range of financial and accounting services required by a charity or small business
•  Knowledge of accounting principles and maintaining strong financial controls
•  Ability to manage a complex and varied workload and to work under pressure

Desirable

•  Experience working with remote teams

Please download an Application Form and send the completed form to [email protected] before the deadline.