Head of the African Coding Network

Head: African Coding Network

Job Description

Context

Umuzi is looking for someone passionate, self driven and empathetic to lead our highly impactful and rapidly growing project, the African Coding Network. 

This exciting role will be responsible for growing our impact through digital skills training across Africa, bringing our industry leading training models to new markets, partnerships and communities in order to support African youth from “learning to earning”. 

The appointed will have ownership of the project, and work closely with Umuzi’s directors and department managers, as well as collaborate with senior project partners and other stakeholders, including the African Union, Google.org,  various UNICEF country offices and  UNICEF lead projects,  yoma and Generation Unlimited. 

Introducing the African Coding Network

The African Coding Network creates more accessible ‘learning to earning’ pathways to increase the employability of young Africans in the growing tech economy.

We do this through partnerships that focus on youth employability: supporting young Africans to select quality learning to earning pathways, train in in-demand digital skills, and accelerate their careers in tech.

After more than a decade of success in South Africa, partnering with leading employers to reach over 1,000 young people, Umuzi founded the African Coding Network to reach young people across the African continent and support them into high-value digital careers. 

The African Coding Network project has achieved international recognition:

• QS/Wharton reimagine education 2020: Best online programme for nurturing 21st century skills (winner) 

• Ashoka future skills challenge: Most scalable solution (winner) 

• African Union Innovating Education: Finalist, top 5, 2021 (winner to be announced Dec 2021) 

Problem

Youth account for 60% of Africa’s unemployed. The youth population is expected to double by 2050. Africa needs to meet the current and growing future needs of economic activity for African Youth.

An economic opportunity exists in Africa's rapidly growing technology sector, where the need for local tech skills is growing. Traditional education is failing to keep pace with the growing demand for tech skills. Moreover, existing opportunities exacerbate inequality, favouring men, financially excluding the poor, and benefiting those few with access to the internet.

Solution

To address the tech skills AND inequality gaps, the African Coding Network aggregates and supports three key stakeholder networks - Youth, Coding Schools, Employers - and establishes a shared-value marketplace between supply and demand:

• Select: We generate awareness of tech careers among African youth - specifically marginalised youth and women and identify high-potential, underserved talent, to guide them towards tech learning opportunities. 

• Train: Our blended learning model combines the scalability of remote online education and human touch facilitation to support young people to rapidly reach an employable level of skill and experience. 

• Our basic and advanced training pathways are closely managed by our team of facilitators and subject matter experts, supported by our tech learning platform, Tilde. Our training is fully online, asynchronous, project based and collaborative.
  
  

• Accelerate: We link work-ready youth to economic opportunities with our network of employer partners. 

Our youth-centred approach focuses on the end-to-end support needed to get African youth economically active in tech careers, at scale.

Take a moment to watch our African Coding Network explainer video. 

The Africa-wide initiative building employability in the tech sector

We have secured commitments from a range of co-funding partners, including:

• University of Geneva

• UNICEF Prospects programme (SSA) and UNICEF Nigeria 

• Google.org

• Maria Marina Foundation

• BOTNAR Foundation

We have also partnered with leading South African employers to deliver digital skills development programmes, including:

• Old Mutual

• Investec

• Discovery

• TIH

• Sanlam

• Telkom

• And ~30 other employer partners

In 2021, we supported an additional 550 learners across Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya. Our goal for 2022 is to grow the number of young people we engage with initial regional focus to include South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Burundi. 

Job responsibilities: 

• Nurtures, Leads and Manages People 

• Demonstrates Self Awareness and Ethical Awareness 

• Works Collaboratively with others 

• Builds and Maintains Partnerships 

• Innovates and Embraces Change 

• Thinks and Acts Strategically 

• Drives to achieve impactful results 

• Manages ambiguity and complexity 

Broad strategic management areas: 

The below list is not exhaustive, and subject to change. Leading the expansion of both implementation and impact, the position requires an ability to work in an environment of high ambiguity. The project lead must make strategic decisions based on successes or failures of pilot programmes, be open minded and opportunistic, and implement shifts in strategy based on a variety of variables. Lastly, and most importantly, the lead must ensure a strong youth focus with the primary aim of increasing impact for underrepresented African youth, primarily measured by improved access to economic opportunity.

• Programme management, 

• Select: 

• Work with the Umuzi recruitment team to find, assess and onboard candidates to various learning pathways. 

• Train:

• Communicate with the educational delivery team to ensure learners at various points of the training are on track, or support is provided where need be. 

• Lead teams to test and deliver new training pathways, running various pilot programmes to generate strong evidence of approach

• Accelerate: 

• Engage with employers, and our internal career services team, to support youth into economic opportunities. 

• Build key relationships with public and private sector employers. 

• Stakeholder management with various partners

• Developmental partners:

• Multilaterals, eg. UNICEF, GIZ, African Union. 

• Foundations, including new funding partnership opportunities. 

• Training partners: 

• African Universities, TVET colleges and Local coding schools. 

• Content partners:

• Micro accreditation programmes such as Grow with Google, Amazon web services, Coursera, ect. 

• Private / public sector:

• Local government and private sector employers, who are directly affected by the digital skills gap. 

• Building repeatable systems and building capacity 

• Explore new learning pathways for African youth, building and managing teams and systems to deliver learner support at scale.

• Expande products and services through various partnerships to meet the unique demands of Africa’s digital skill gap, both locally and regionally. 

Candidate preference: 

• Candidates should have a minimum of >5 years of experience in a relevant field, such as international development, education or social entrepreneurship. 

• Relevant education is a bonus, but not critical. 

• This role is open to residents of any Sub-Saharan African country. 

• Reflecting our project objectives to promote diversity in the tech sector, preference will be given to female candidates. 

• Competitive market-related salary will be offered based on experience. 

Process and next steps

1. Please email your CV and cover letter to Warwick Vlantis, warwick@africancodng.network

2. Successful applicants will be notified to move to a second round of the application process, and will be required to complete a simple skills assessment created by our team. 

3. Shortlisted candidates will undergo a series of interviews and final appointment aims to be made by January, 2022.