Job Opportunity for Project Consultant (Academic) at Central Square Foundation in Bhubaneshwar

Position: Project Lead – Monitoring & Evaluation, EdTech

Location: Delhi

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. We are driven by our mission to transform the school education system with a focus on improving the learning outcomes of children, especially from low-income communities. To know more about CSF, please visit-

Position Summary:

One of the key areas of CSF’s work is EdTech (Education Technology). Under this thematic area, we focus on how technology can be leveraged to improve the teaching-learning experience within classrooms and at homes – through both student-focussed and teacher-directed interventions for low-income contexts. Our goal is to leverage technology to improve foundational learning in primary grades. We do this by funding the creation of public goods to improve the quality of the supply, providing grants to build capacity of early-stage organizations that cater to the target population, building evidence on the efficacy of different EdTech solutions to understand what works and what doesn’t, through government test beds and by driving innovation within government systems by reforming public policy advocacy and strengthening government capacity to enable sustainable large-scale adoption.

The Project Lead, EdTech will be responsible for driving the evidence generation agenda for EdTech. With very limited knowledge in the ecosystem on successful EdTech models driving student learning, one of the core goals for the team is to plug this lack of evidence. It is imperative to identify promising hypotheses and build rigorous evidence around these different EdTech models, particularly for the low-income context. The Project Lead will have to develop and manage relationships with multiple stakeholders including researchers, grantee organisations, implementation partners or any other organization CSF may support to conceptualize and execute on programs/projects that can enable the creation of knowledge around EdTech in India. The Project Lead, EdTech role directly reports to the Senior Project Lead, EdTech.

Key responsibilities include, but not limited to:

• Support and lead the growing EdTech portfolio to generate, disseminate, and synthesize rigorous evidence around different models of implementation for EdTech
• Identify innovative hypotheses based on current and future trends in EdTech and build a pipeline of potential solutions for evaluation
• Work with EdTech organizations, other philanthropic / civil society organizations and researchers to manage implementation/evaluations for portfolio partners end-to-end, i.e. from design to execution and reporting phases
• Support partner organizations in conceptualizing and designing programs for generative evidence
• Ensure delivery on outcomes by implementing organizations as per mutually agreed goals
• Create knowledge products such as advocacy notes, handbooks, etc to share best practices and results from evaluations to inform the ecosystem
• Promote coordination and cumulative learning among internal and external teams demonstrating best practices in specific areas of education

Required Qualifications, Skills and Abilities:

• Masters or equivalent degree required (background in Public Policy or Economics is preferred)
• 4 – 8 years of experience in monitoring and evaluation roles, exposure to the education/EdTech sector will be preferred
• An understanding of M&E frameworks, statistical techniques, and experimental research methods such as RCTs, difference-and-difference, action research, etc.
• Excellent project management skills and communication skills
• Demonstrated ability to build & manage relationships with multiple stakeholders 

Desired Qualities:

• Entrepreneurial spirit, self-starter with a ‘can-do’ attitude
• Operating style suited to working with internal and external teams where teamwork, collaboration and resourcefulness are highly valued
• Excellent leadership skills, including ability to manage multiple projects at a time

Compensation: Remuneration will be competitive with Indian philanthropy pay scales and will depend upon the candidate’s experience levels.