Central Square Foundation - Project Manager/Project Lead

Project Manager/ Project Lead

Position : Project Manager/Project Lead, 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.

CSF is one of the portfolio organizations under the umbrella of The Convergence Foundation (TCF), a grant-making organisation run by Ashish Dhawan that builds and scales new foundations in key areas of India's development sector. TCF aims to build 20+ new foundations in the next 15 years that will create impact at scale in the sectors they operate in.

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 and provide remediation support in middle school.

- 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 for 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 build rigorous evidence around different models of implementation

- Identify innovative hypotheses based on current and future trends in EdTech and build a pipeline of potential solutions for evaluation

- Manage implementation/evaluations for portfolio partners end-to-end, i.e. from design to execution and reporting phases.

- Support partner/grantee organizations in conceptualizing and designing programs for implementation

- Ensure delivery on outcomes by partner/grantee organizations as per mutually agreed goals

- Create knowledge products such as advocacy notes, handbook 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 Education, Public Policy or Business)

- 3 to 5 years for a Project Manager & 5 - 8 years of experience for a Project Lead with exposure to the education/EdTech sector, especially in monitoring and evaluation roles

- Excellent project management skills and communication skills

- Demonstrated ability to build & manage relationships with multiple stakeholders

- An understanding of statistical techniques and research methodologies used in the social sciences is good to have