Central Square Foundation - Senior Consultant - EdTech Domain

Position: Senior Consultant, EdTech

Location: New 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.

We believe that effective foundational learning is essential for better learning outcomes for all children in school. Development of foundational literacy and numeracy skills by Class 3 can help children progress to higher levels of learning which is an essential building block for creating equal access to opportunities needed for leading a better life.

In order to achieve this, we partner with individuals and social impact organizations to bring innovative solutions in education, as well as work with the government to drive systemic impact. We also collaborate with the ecosystem to leverage knowledge and create resources to address critical issues in early learning, technology in education, classroom instruction methods and governance.

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. 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.

One of the key projects where we are currently supporting the Ministry of Education is National Digital Education Architecture (NDEAR). In line with the National Education Policy 2020, the Ministry of Education has envisioned NDEAR to be a digital infrastructure for education that will not only help the government at Centre, State and UTs but the entire education ecosystem including private sector, non-profit and technology players to enhance the quality of education in the country through innovation and experimentation. It is part of Govt. of India's Digital India initiative and it endeavors to make lives simpler and teaching-learning more effective for students, parents, teachers and administrators.

The Senior Consultant, EdTech will work closely with the Additional Secretary, MoE and also the PMU that will be established for implementation of NDEAR. The Senior Consultant, EdTech role directly reports to the Director, EdTech at CSF. The duration of this assignment will be 1 year from the date of joining.

Key Responsibilities, but not limited to:

- Provide strategic inputs to Additional Secretary at Ministry of Education on the NDEAR project

- Help create alignment on NDEAR related issues between and MoE officials and the technical team

- Provide strong project management oversight to ensure that the project is on-track and bring any variances to the attention of Additional Secretary

- Ensure that project updates are provided at agreed-upon frequency

- Act as a bridge between CSF and MoE on the NDEAR project so as to ensure that relevant expertise within CSF is fully leveraged for NDEAR

Required Qualifications, Skills and Abilities

- 5-7 years of experience in Project Management in the IT sector. Specific exposure to large- scale, open architecture platforms preferable, especially on government projects.

- Desire to contribute to creation of technology-driven public platforms

- Proven ability to contribute to user-centric technology solutions delivered at scale

- A self-starter with a proven ability to work independently.

- Experience of demystifying and communicating technology concepts to non-tech users and vice-versa

- Strong verbal and written communication skills