Marketing and Communications Specialist

Job description

**Based**:Tamale, Ghana or Jinja, Uganda (we would consider alternative remote working arrangements if required)

**About us**

Our mission is to get preschool children in rural Africa school-ready. At present over 250 million children worldwide fail to receive the education and care they need in their early years which means they are less likely to do well in school, find gainful employment, and are at greater risk of early marriage, early parenthood and even criminality. Current approaches to solving this crisis are not proving effective or scalable in lower middle income countries.

That’s where Lively Minds comes in. We have developed an award-winning Early Childhood Development programme that has been proven through randomised control trial to improve cognitive and socio-emotional skills and reduce malnutrition for pre-schoolers in hard-to-reach communities school-ready, so they have a greater chance of succeeding in school and in life. The programme provides marginalised Mothers with a parenting course that empowers them to run educational Play Schemes for pre-schoolers and to provide better home-based care, using cheap local resources. In addition, we started a radio programme for parents during COVID and this has now become a permanent fixture. The programme is delivered through government partners, is cheap and highly scalable. It genuinely has the potential to play a transformative role in ending the global ECD crisis.

We are extremely proud that the Government of Ghana have now adopted the programme and we have a ground-breaking partnership with them to support them to institutionalise it, fund it and to scale it to 60 education districts, reaching over 4000 communities and 1million children. In addition, an award-winning international research team are conducting a further randomised control trial to help us understand its impacts at scale. We see this as the test case that will provide the blueprint to take the programme to scale it to a new country within the next few years.

We’re a lively ambitious organisation, determined to have a major positive impact on the world. We work hard, at a fast pace, in a challenging environment. We expect everyone to give their best to achieve the best possible results. Our work is demanding but provides plenty of opportunity for innovation, responsibility, growth, collaboration, creativity and fun. We want all staff to be happy, fulfilled and to feel appreciated and valued in their work.

**About the role**

We are recruiting a Marketing and Communications Specialist, who will support the implementation of our Fundraising and Advocacy strategies. The postholder will project manage our communications and marketing initiatives to ensure that Lively Minds is well positioned to attract new donors (corporate, major donors, philanthropic foundations and institutional) to continue our expansion. Expansion plans include scaling the programme nationwide in Ghana, regionally in Uganda, running a pilot of our radio programme and exploring new countries to operate in. The postholder will oversee the Marketing and Communications Officer who is based in Tamale and will support in the creation of communication pieces to fulfil our aims.

The role will report to the Head of Fundraising and work closely with the Head of Advocacy
This would be the ideal role for an experienced communications professional with an interest in fundraising or a fundraiser with a flair for creative design. This is an exciting time to be joining the team and a unique opportunity for an individual with excellent communication skills, project management experience and a passion for creativity to make their mark on this newly created role and to have an impact on the future direction of Lively Minds.