Project Lead (PL), ECE State Projects Full Time

 

 

About CSF

 

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. CSF has a mission focused on ensuring high-quality foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) for all children in India. To achieve this,we partner with individuals and social impact organizations to bring innovative solutions in education and build the capacity of the government to drive systemic impact.

 

 

 

About the PNI team

 

To drive school education outcomes across the country, CSF establishes strong partnerships with key players within the development sector. These include non-profits, social enterprises, donors, consultants,other enablers etc. The Partnerships & New Initiatives team envisions, designs, builds and nurtures a variety of projects in collaboration with a host of different stakeholders. The team also acts as an in-house incubator for new initiatives and issue areas (eg. Early Childhood Education), and also works closely with the Managing Directors on projects of key strategic significance at an organizational level.

 

 

 

 

Position Summary

 

The PL (PNI) will work as part of the newly reconstituted Early Childhood Education team at CSF to ensure successful design and delivery of ECE pilots in States. Major work-streams include:

 

1. Project design and people management: working with project managers and internal teams to design and manage ECE projects in focus states

2. Government stakeholder engagement: representing CSF as a credible partner and working with key stakeholder across Departments of Education and Women and Child Development

3. Co-develop strategy for ECE team, state projects and teaching-learning materials: Develop,refine and contextualize CSF’s POV on ECE state programs and teaching-learning materials

This role provides an excellent opportunity to shape CSF’s ECE state projects work and develop feasible models for states to ensure universal provisioning of ECE through anganwadis and/or government pre-primary sections. It also affords a great opportunity to work closely with (and learn directly from) senior members in various issue teams at CSF. To know more about us and our work,

visit https://www.centralsquarefoundation.org/early-childhood-education.

 

 

 

Key responsibilities

 

Project Design and Management (45%)

 

● Manage a portfolio of state projects and work closely with project managers to design project strategy and manage projects end-to-end

● Set up project management processes and guidelines, prepare strategic roadmaps and set up mechanisms to identify breaks in delivery and problem-solve with internal/external stakeholders

● Ensure all the major workstreams and interventions for ECE get activated and implemented in consultation with State and internal stakeholders, leveraging best practices from CSF’s FLN work

○ Teaching Learning Materials for children and teachers of ECE grades

○ Capacity building of teachers, academic staff and officers

○ District governance mechanisms and institutional structures for implementation

○ Monitoring systems and processes to track progress

○ Continuous programme monitoring and reporting to key stakeholders

○ Manage evaluation of the intervention with external agencies

● Critically review work-products, documents, outputs and ensure efficient and effective project delivery

 

● Actively build internal capabilities and support team members by sharing learnings providing feedback and ensuring their training and development

 

Manage design of strategy and public goods for ECE teaching-learning materials (30%)

 

● Work closely with the Classroom Instruction and Practice team at CSF to develop a coherent,informed approach to ECE materials, training, assessments and mentoring; in line with CSF’s FLN PoV for teaching-learning

● Work closely with team members to develop exemplar public goods for the above and work with State teams to strengthen State curriculum and trainings

 

Stakeholder Management (15%)

 

● Direct and indirect engagement with senior bureaucratic and education leadership in the district/state to ensure alignment, prioritization, resources and action to achieve ECE project goals

● Facilitate conversations with internal and external stakeholder, set up and manage partnerships to leverage the best support for State government

 

Other projects (10%)

 

● Develop proposals and strategy for new State ECE projects in consultation with Government stakeholders and external partner organizations

● Support with any Central engagements on ECE

● Provide strategic and project management support to the other workstream in ECE: research and salience

 

What would make you a good fit for the role:

 

● Strong academic background from a reputed institute with a Master’s degree (preferred) in education, social sciences, management etc

● 5 – 8 years of progressive hands-on work experience in implementation of education projects with state governments. Experience in managing teams (based in different locations) is preferred.

● Extremely high analytical, synthesis and problem-solving abilities. The role requires synthesizing complex information from multiple sources, developing and communicating an informed perspective effectively

● Experience of coordinating with senior stakeholders in the state such as Secretaries / State Project Directors / Directors etc.

● High level of flexibility and responsiveness with the ability to shift priorities quickly as project demands require and travel frequently

● Entrepreneurial spirit and ‘can-do’ attitude & hands-on operating style suited to working in a small organization setting

● Strong communication skills (spoken, written, presentation) with an ability to tailor messaging for different audiences like government officials, technical NGO partners, internal issue teams etc.

Fluency in English and Hindi is preferred.

● Applicants with prior primary-grade teaching experience through fellowships such as Teach For India, and/or understanding of early-grade curriculum and pedagogy are encouraged to apply.

 

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Tagged as: project management, stakeholder management