Job Description

Organisation: Lively Minds. UK Registered Charity 1125512

Position: Grants & Project Support Officer

Reports to: Chief Executive Officer

Location: Jinja, Uganda (with some travel to Ghana and UK)

Hours: Full time

Contract: Permanent

About us

Over 250 million children under 5 globally do not get the early childhood care and education (“ECCE”) they need, leading to poor health, poor education, lost life opportunities and poverty.

Lively Minds is an award-winning charity tackling this crisis in rural Ghana & Uganda. We believe that one of the main barriers to ECCE is that parents in remote resource-poor villages lack the information, education and aspiration to provide basic and affordable opportunities for their children. 

We have developed an innovative behaviour change programme that empowers uneducated and marginalised Mothers in resource-poor communities to run educational Play Schemes for pre-schoolers and to provide better home-based care, using cheap local resources. Not only does this result in positive outcomes for child development, but also has positive impacts for the Mothers too.

These are exciting times for Lively Minds. Having proven the success of our programme at small-scale, we are now in the process of making a step-change and scaling rapidly. We are partnering with the Government of Ghana to scale to 67 education districts and 4,000 schools in Ghana (to reach over 1 million pre-schoolers). In Uganda, we are currently testing pathways to scale, implementing in one district (325 communities) and will develop our scale-up strategy in 2021.

Our main income source is through grants. Current donors include Global Innovation Fund, USAID, Omidyar Network, UNICEF, Grand Challenges Canada, Echidna Giving Foundation, and ELMA Philanthropies. We're looking for a Grants & Support Officer to help us manage our reporting obligations to these funders and who can provide general support for programme activities. The postholder will be in based in our Uganda office but will be working on activities for the whole organisation. This is a unique opportunity for anyone looking for a way to get involved in international development to be involved in all aspects of grant management, implementation and organisational support.

Main duties and responsibilities

• Work with our Head of Monitoring & Evaluation, Country Directors, project teams and finance teams, to generate high quality and timely donor reports to keep donors aware of and engage them in our progress, successes and challenges.
• Help share learnings and best practices across the organisation and contribute to regular “quality assurance” activities and audits.
• Support the development of a fundraising strategy and deliver fundraising activities through researching fundraising opportunities, contributing towards grant applications, and preparing pitches.
• Work with our Marketing Communications Manager to support the development of promotional activities and materials for grassroots, regional, national & international funders and stakeholders including videos, field visits, in-country conferences, impact and progress reports, presentations, speeches, blogs, and website content.
• Support general operations and project activities through writing lesson plans/training materials, conducting focus groups and research, and setting-up and coordinating multi-person conference calls and meetings across multiple time-zones.
• Ensure legal compliance by monitoring and implementing applicable donor requirements, and maintaining records.
• Assist with administrative and general office functions (e.g. responding to general email and phone enquires, donor and supporter queries, sourcing in-kind donations).

Experience/skills

You are…

We are looking for someone with the confidence and experience to work with all our teams, and with the communication skills to produce high quality written reports. You will be working in a multi-national, multi-disciplinary team that is spread across three countries.

To succeed in this role you must:

• be an excellent writer and communicator. You must be confident in producing donor proposals and reports, which are accurate, concise and compelling.
• be analytical. You will need to develop high quality reports and insights based on a sound understanding of donor requirements, and challenges/learnings/achievements/impact in the field.
• be hands-on. You will need to be out in the field to understand the programme and our impact.
• be able to deliver quality at pace. We have a very busy workload and strict deadlines. You need to be organised, proactive and outcomes-focussed.
• be innovative. We operate in resource-poor settings, with challenging stakeholders and with limited resources. You will need to adopt an excellent analytical approach and be prepared to test and learn in order to find creative and sustainable solutions and sustain high quality grant management and reporting.
• be a team-player. You will need to maintain regular contact with our global partners and work effectively with our Monitoring & Evaluation Team and project teams to source the information you need to develop reports and proposals.
• be a self-starter. You must be comfortable working with limited supervision and managing a complex and varied workload.