Program Director, Learning Links Liberia

Job Description

About Learning Links

In cooperation with the US Agency for International Development, the Kaizen Company is supporting USAID’s ‘Learning Links Program’ in Liberia, a USAID initiative that provides girls with access to an innovative, safe, and rigorously monitored learning environment. The Learning Links approach works to achieve the following goals:

1. Improve the literacy and numeracy skills of girls who have left school due to pregnancy in Bong County, Liberia

2. Provide quality, accessible, and reliable education resources for out-of-school girls

3. Deploy an innovative and potentially game-changing education model that combines proven education approaches in a new way.

Learning Links strives to achieve these goals by tapping into an existing, underutilized resource: literate and numerate Liberian women who want to help their communities and supplement their incomes. With the right mechanisms, incentives, support, and oversight in place, these women provide educational support to pregnant girls and young mothers in Bong County, and more broadly, to out-of-school children across Liberia. The program’s activities train literate and numerate women to serve as tutor-mentors for the Liberian Ministry of Education’s (MOE) Alternative Basic Education (ABE) curriculum and connect them to girls who have dropped out of school due to pregnancy.

Scope and Objectives

The Kaizen Company is recruiting a Program Director for Learning Links in Liberia. The Program Director will play a core operational role in the sustainability of an innovative education program serving female students who were forced to leave school due to pregnancy. The Program Director will be based in Gbarnga, Liberia and will lead the project and country office, focusing on developing relationships between the Learners and Tutor-Mentors and monitoring the effectiveness of innovative e-learning tools and an incentive program. S/he will work with local leaders to identify communities that can benefit from community-based, demand-driven learning. The Program Director should demonstrate a strong understanding of education, technology, and gender, along with creativity and resourcefulness.

Preferred Qualifications

• Minimum five years’ experience working on education, gender or social impact projects
• Demonstrated ability to identify and design strategies for improving access to education for young girls
• Familiarity with USAID program management, rules and regulations
• Experience designing and communicating workflows to utilize data and digital platforms for e-learning
• Master’s Degree (preferred) in education, public administration, education and technology, gender, international affairs or a related field
• Minimum of three years’ of overseas field experienced based in one or more developing countries, preferably in Sub-Saharan Africa. Experience in West Africa is preferred
• Minimum of two years’ of supervisory experience
• Demonstrated experience in public sector engagement in developing and/or implementing innovative approaches to development challenges
• Strong organizational skills and attention to detail are required, along with an ability to work under pressure and manage multicultural groups of people in remote locations
• Excellent oral and written communication skills

About the Organization

The Kaizen Company (Kaizen) is a development consulting firm that cultivates innovative, scalable solutions that address emerging market challenges and opportunities. For more than a decade, Kaizen has brought innovation into the world of donor-funded international development in Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America/Caribbean, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

In parallel, Kaizen has been incubating innovations to scale through market forces to achieve development objectives without the need for donor funding. Our proven solutions catalyze locally driven organizational and institutional performance improvements and establish communities of practice that facilitate peer-to-peer learning and the achievement of shared goals.

We leverage existing knowledge, technology, and new media, and local peer networks to support local reforms. Since our inception, we have provided support to more than 100 government, private-sector, and non-profit organizations in markets worldwide.