Product Director— SIFA job at Educate

Who We Are!

? 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:

• Introducing an employment-focused school subject into secondary and
• 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.

Good to note: To Our Awesome Applicants! ??

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.

Position Overview

At Educate!, we create and deliver learning experiences reshaping what youth employment looks like across Africa — building products that reach hundreds of thousands of young people in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania. As Product Director for SIFA, you will set strategic direction across a complex, high-ambition digital product, leveraging impact through Product Leads, cross-product coordination, and a high-performing team of designers, engineers, coaching experts, and product associates.

SIFA is Educate!'s AI-powered business coaching product, delivered digitally to help out-of-school youth micro-entrepreneurs make profit visible, strengthen cashflow discipline, and reduce capital trapped in customer credit. It is the product with the clearest ambition to become the digital backbone of the entire Educate! portfolio — scalable, data-generating, and increasingly intelligent with every cohort it runs. The Product Director joining now steps into a product that has moved from concept to MVP, has generated its first real evidence of impact, and is now navigating the most consequential strategic decisions in its lifecycle: how to go from 1,200 youth to 20,000, and then to scale the product to millions of youth.

This role demands more than oversight of a well-run team. You will weigh external research, evaluation findings, and experimental results to guide high-stakes trade-offs under genuine uncertainty. You will own the investment case, resolve cross-product and cross-functional trade-offs, and influence business unit priorities through the quality of your product strategy — operating within the strategic direction set by the business unit leader while exercising real strategic authority within that frame.

The decisions you make here carry very high irreversibility. Investment memo recommendations, stage-gate calls, and portfolio positioning choices for SIFA materially affect Educate!'s digital strategy for years. This role is for a product leader who understands what it means to hold that kind of accountability and who can build a team culture where evidence quality, learning rigour, and strategic coherence are non-negotiable.

For an experienced product leader who wants to operate with a high degree of ownership, build a strong team, and work in a genuinely mission-driven environment, this role offers the chance to do your most impactful work.

Expected Impact

This role sits at the most consequential inflection point in SIFA's lifecycle. The product has moved from concept to MVP and generated its first credible evidence of impact — and the Product Director joining now will determine whether that evidence holds at scale, and whether SIFA becomes the digital backbone of Educate!'s portfolio or remains a promising pilot. Within this role's tenure, SIFA is accountable for the following outcomes:

• MVP(Most Valuable Player) v4 completes with a clear go/iterate/pause recommendation for the 5,000-youth pilot, grounded in profit uplift, engagement, credit recovery, delivery model viability, and operational readiness evidence.
• The (Cost Per Youth) CPY model for SIFA is fully costed and pressure-tested against the 100,000-youth cost point, with a clear ROI narrative presented to the Investment Committee.
• SIFA's data architecture is live, decision-useful, and actively used in quarterly OKR reviews — with the product dashboard reflecting current-stage metrics including profit uplift, engagement, credit recovery, micro-action completion, and platform availability.
• By the end of 2027, SIFA will serve 20,000 enrolled users through its digital coaching product, with evidence of sustained engagement and measurable business performance improvements at scale.
• By 2028, SIFA will reach 2 million youth, backed by a completed external Randomized Control and Treatment Study) RCT confirming a 30% income gain and a minimum 6X 3-year income ROI at the 100,000-youth cost point.
• By 2029, SIFA will operate as the evidence-backed digital backbone of Educate!'s portfolio — with a proven impact model, a live data pipeline generating continuous learning, and an AI coaching layer that makes the entire livelihoods and ESS portfolio smarter, cheaper, and more attractive to payers with every cohort.

• Set strategic direction across a complex, high-ambition digital product.
• Leverage impact through Product Leads, cross-product coordination, and a high-performing team of designers, engineers, coaching experts, and product associates.
• Weigh external research, evaluation findings, and experimental results to guide high-stakes trade-offs under genuine uncertainty.
• Own the investment case.
• Resolve cross-product and cross-functional trade-offs.
• Influence business unit priorities through the quality of your product strategy.
• Build a team culture where evidence quality, learning rigour, and strategic coherence are non-negotiable.

• Product strategy
• Team leadership
• Data analysis
• Research interpretation
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Strategic decision-making
• Evidence-based decision making

• Experienced product leader.
• Ability to operate with a high degree of ownership.
• Ability to build a strong team.
• Passion for mission-driven work.