Job Opportunity for Associate Director, State Reform at Madhi Foundation in Chennai

About the role:

You will be leading an exciting role, with pan-project visibility and oversight. You will be working on building strategy to deliver impactful programmes to achieve the organisation’s vision and mission in partnership with the Government. You would lead a highly skilled, energetic and multifaceted team who excel in curricular development, training, field work, and work towards Government adoption of Madhi’s programmes in Tamil Nadu.

The challenges you will help solve in this role

● Addressing the unique challenges that the public education space faces.

● Planning and implementing projects applying various permutations and combinations that ultimately address the foundational learning challenges

● Contribute purposefully to the growing body of knowledge on what works and what doesn’t work to improve last mile educational outcomes for children, through the public sector delivery; in particular- by contextualising findings to the Indian context.

● We are an outcome-driven organisation and we do not obsess over clocking in and clocking out. As the sub-vertical head, you will be responsible to identify ways in which we can hold your team accountable to a high bar of excellence with a singular focus on outcomes by setting up systems that let us keep our eye on the ball at all times.

The Job Description

Below is an indicative set of responsibilities you will be required to lead as part of your role. We believe that a job description is best created collaboratively where the individual joining the team and the senior
leadership team together define the role in greater detail so it reflects your aspirations and ambitions as much as it does the organisation’s needs. A detailed description can be jointly created once the selection process has been completed and you have accepted our offer of employment.

In this role, some of your responsibilities will include

Strategic Leadership

● Operate with a great sense of ownership and urgency and own all decisions taken by the State Reform team

● Set the vision for the programme and thought partner with the Leadership (Co-founders) team to drive the organisational vision

● Be responsible for creating the resource and staff projections for the successful implementation of the programme

● Set and achieve goals for the sub-vertical and support the senior managers of all the domains and teams to ensure that all goals are met successfully

● Be a part of Madhi’s Organisational Strategy team and contribute to decision making that impacts organisational direction and impact

● Lead or support all report and brief writing processes specifically when related to State Reform sub-vertical and generally related to organisational communication

Programme Monitoring

● Critically analyse the impact of the programme on an ongoing basis and look for ways to strengthen programmatic components for greater impact

● Guide the team to carry out extensive research in FL and ensure all programmatic decisions are rooted in strong and proven research principles

● Collaborate with the MEL team at Madhi to identify impact metrics, monitor and evaluate the impact of the program – this may include but is not limited to developing survey instruments, evaluation plans and executing the MEL plan with the support from other sub-verticals at Madhi

● Ensure that the project deliverables meets Madhi’s and state’s quality standards

Team Management

● Manage a highly skilled and motivated team and constantly strive to help them grow and realise their potential

● Ensure all team management structures are followed diligently and personalise support as and when required

● Support the Senior Managers of each project team to create a vision and set goals for their respective teams, organise work streams effectively and ensure every team member works towards collective and individual goals

● Support the Senior Managers to create detailed project plans for their respective verticals and ensure the project strategy and plans are robust, comprehensive and in alignment with organisational strategy

● Support the Senior Managers to troubleshoot issues from time to time and create strong support structures that improve efficiency and productivity and help a highly diverse team actualize their potential

● Establish systems and processes to capture learnings from implementation and help the team make incremental changes to the programme to improve process and impact outcomes

Stakeholder Management

● Lead the strategic partnership effort with the Government to ensure Madhi’s continued partnership with the state

● Represent Madhi in external meetings and events and articulate Madhi’s project vision in a compelling manner

You will thrive in this role if you:

● Demonstrate the highest degree of integrity throughout all activities and are obsessed with making learning impactful for the last mile child

● Have prior experience of creating strategic, data-driven policy advocacy based on data analysis from field inputs; are comfortable dealing with both quantitative and qualitative data

● Have proven planning skills and take pride in seeing projects through to completion

● Can manage and resolve conflicts on an everyday basis

● Can diplomatically communicate insights from and action required on data which can, at times, be dispiriting

● Are able to problem-solve from first principles, since much of what we do hasn’t been done before

● Are highly planned, organised, methodical, meticulous and detail oriented

● Thrive in a deadline oriented environment in creating collaterals for external stakeholders

● Have excellent stakeholder management skills, especially within a public sector setting

● Have an entrepreneurial zest to own and deliver

Prerequisites include:

● At least 10 – 12 years of work experience with a minimum of 4 – 5 years of people management and project management experience

● A bachelor’s degree in a relevant subject; qualifications in Education would be an added advantage

● Experience in the education/development sector is mandatory

● Excellent knowledge of MS Office, G Suite, Digital Survey Tools and Data Visualisation Tools

● Excellent written communication and report writing skills in English

● Ability and willingness to work in a startup non-profit environment

This role will report to: Co-Founder, Head of Programmes
Location: Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Please note: You will be expected to bring your own laptop with updated software (MS Office 2016)
Remuneration: INR 17 LPA to INR 20 LPA