Senior Product Manager — Rwanda Portfolio

🌍 Africa has the world’s youngest and fastest-growing population. By 2035, the continent is poised to contribute more young people to the global workforce each year than the rest of the world combined. 

At Educate! we're obsessed with impact. We leverage iterative learning to build highly scalable youth employment solutions aimed at unlocking the potential of the world’s youngest continent. 

Educate! prepares youth in Africa to learn, earn and thrive in today’s economy by: 

1. Introducing an employment-focused school subject into secondary and 
2. Delivering livelihood boot camps for out-of-school youth, with a focus on marginalized rural girls and young women.

To date, more than 500,000 youth have been meaningfully impacted across Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Tanzania, and along the way, Educate! has become the largest youth employment and skills provider in East Africa.

Educate! is a team of over 300 largely African staff and 300 volunteer youth mentors. We prioritize building an engaging, fulfilling and growth oriented work environment. 50% of our top 30 leaders have been with us for over 5 years, 10+ alumni have started their own organizations, and 6 current or former team members were Acumen Fund East Africa fellows. 

We have been backed by top foundations such as Imaginable Futures, Livelihood Impact Fund,  Jack Dorsey’s #startsmall, CIFF and Echidna Giving. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize and a 2015 WISE Award, and has been highlighted by the World Bank’s S4YE's Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, BBC, The Brookings Institution as one of 14 case studies on scaling education, and the Gates Foundation as a Goalkeepers Accelerator. In 2022, we received a catalytic investment from philanthropist Mackenzie Scott to scale our systems change work.

Educate!'s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year.

We know that incredible candidates sometimes hesitate to apply if they don’t meet every requirement. If this role excites you, we encourage you to apply! 

We’re looking for passionate individuals who believe in our mission and can bring unique perspectives to our team—not just those who check every box. We value diversity and strongly encourage women and individuals from all backgrounds to apply.

At Educate!, we build learning experiences that change what youth employment looks like across Africa — products reaching hundreds of thousands of young people in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania. As Senior Product Manager — Rwanda Portfolio, you will own the translation of the broader strategy to quarterly strategy aligned to the learning experience (LX) strategy and agreed roadmap set for Rwanda for the PBA Sustainability Phase and the AI for Systems Change Product Suite. This is not a programme management role. It is a product role with real strategic authority over what gets built, how it gets tested, and whether it scales.

Rwanda’s team is small. There is no dedicated designer on the ground. As a result, this role carries a dual mandate: product strategy and learning experience (LX) design. You will own both — from defining what gets built and why, leveraging the wider design team for support, to making sure the materials, tools, and experiences that reach students, teachers, and district officials are grounded in evidence and fit for context.

You will work closely with the Global Director, ESS & Tech Products, who sets the broader strategy. Your job is to translate that strategic direction into executed, evidence-backed products at speed — and over time to take on increasing ownership of investment decisions, government engagement, and strategic oversight.

If you are a hands-on operator who also thinks strategically, can hold ambiguity without losing momentum, and want to work at the front edge of AI in education, this is the role for you.

• →PBA Year 2 is running in line with the strategy set
• →Coach Fabs prototype is tested with a student cluster and teacher cohort with insights and learning documented to inform scale.
• →CPD digital monitoring framework is designed with REB

Strategic commitment: Convert Rwanda's experimental work into structured, institutionalised systems that reduce dependence on individuals, enable the team to operate without central support, and build institutional memory that allows Rwanda to scale.

• Create and maintain SOPs for PBA design, selection, training, and deployment processes; document all experiment findings systematically in Confluence — not just what happened, but the rationale and what it means for next decisions.
• Build and maintain Rwanda's product performance dashboard — tracking PBA and AI metrics and using it actively in strategic decisions, not just for reporting.
• Lead budget variance (BvA) reviews for Rwanda's product budgets — identifying variances, flagging cost risks, and making financial trade-off recommendations to the Global Director.
• Create institutional memory that allows government stakeholders and internal teams to operate independently — reducing single points of failure at every level of the programme.

• Demonstrated ability to translate strategy into executed products — you have shipped something, measured it, and used the evidence to make the next call.
• Experience managing government or institutional stakeholders in a low-resource, high-stakes context — and a track record of building trust without relying on seniority to open doors.
• Comfort holding ambiguity — you can move fast when the brief is incomplete and know when to ask and when to decide.
• Learning experience or instructional design instinct — you think about how information lands, not just what it says.
• Strong written and analytical communication — you can write a concise synthesis that moves a decision, not just a status report.
• Kinyarwanda fluency and familiarity with Rwanda's education system, government structures, and political landscape is strongly preferred.
• Fits our Five Culture Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here 

• Location is Kigali, Rwanda

We’re ambitious. Are you? Educate! is growing fast, so new opportunities are opening up and expanding all the time. We’re inspired by people with drive, and we love to help them reach their full potential. We expect everyone at Educate! to contribute above and beyond their job description, grow their skills, and advance their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey of their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey. 

1. We put Youth First, Impact-Obsessed - We are purpose-driven, focused on impact, and prioritize what truly matters. We listen to youth, design our efforts around their needs, and ensure every dollar creates transformative experiences they value.
2. We Exceed Expectations - We take pride in going above and beyond to achieve the best results—proactively identifying problems and seeking solutions without waiting or stopping at what's requested.
3. We Are Always Learning - We are committed to seeking and applying new knowledge and ideas. We stay open-minded and continuously try new things, experiment, grow, and improve. We invest in learning for ourselves and our teams.
4. We are One Team, Many Views - We value all individuals, believe diverse ideas and open dialogue drive excellence, foster a supportive and respectful environment where everyone can freely express themselves. We work as one team and prioritize the organization's mission over personal or team interests.
5. We have the Startup Mindset - We innovate relentlessly to grow our impact, we never think “we have arrived” or “we’re done.”We constantly challenge the status quo, embrace change, and move quickly toward our vision. Unafraid of failure, we question anything that hinders progress.

Every person at Educate! — from interns to the executive director — is evaluated by how they live up to these five cultural tenets. They are at the core of how we achieve our mission and why we work as well as we do.  Educate is committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all who interact in our community. In creating this environment, we encourage people from a variety of cultures, backgrounds and life experiences to join our diverse team. 

We’re committed to ensuring all candidates are screened for child and youth safety. As part of the process, candidates must successfully complete our standard background verification and safeguarding review in accordance with local legal standards. Educate! reserves the right to withdraw an offer of employment if any screening results indicate potential risks to youth.