Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
Position Overview
Educate!, a high-growth and award-winning non-profit social enterprise, is seeking a strategic Chief Financial Officer (CFO)/Global Director of Finance to serve as the architect of our financial health and to build the organizational infrastructure needed to support our ambitious scale.

Educate! views finance not just as a compliance function, but as a strategic engine for impact. The right person will be a “strategic architect” who can look beyond the numbers to craft the narrative of our financial future, ensuring our staffing, systems, and processes are built to match our organization and strategy. You will be obsessed with efficiency and eager to design bespoke financial systems that are lean, actionable, and specifically tailored to match the unique stage of each of our products—from pilot to massive scale.

Educate! has grown 3x over the last 4 years, and keen to keep going. The right person will love solving complex strategic problems and coaching teams to internalize cost-consciousness and data-driven decision-making in order to make continued growth a reality. Uniquely, this role does not require a traditional CFO background; we are also open to finance-oriented management consultants, general managers, or strategy/operations leaders.

Note: The title and level of the role will be determined based on the qualifications and experience of the successful candidate.

About Educate!
Africa has the world’s youngest and fastest-growing population. By 2035, the continent is poised to contribute more 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 learn, earn and thrive in today’s economy by:

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

To date, more than 250,000 youth have been meaningfully impacted across Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya, 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, Big Bang Philanthropy, #startsmall, Generation Unlimited, 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.

Performance Objectives

Financial Oversight (25%):

• Provide strategic leadership over financial operations and restrictions management to ensure a strong, sustainable cash position across all countries.
• Oversee accurate, timely financial reporting and maintain internal controls that keep the organization fully audit-ready at all times.
• Champion a culture of cost consciousness and financial discipline, ensuring teams use resources efficiently and responsibly.
• Ensure financial information is consistently reliable, on time, and actionable for leaders and stakeholders to make sound, data-driven decisions.
• Drive swift and effective resolution of all audit recommendations, ensuring financial integrity and compliance remain a non-issue and never disrupt organizational success.

Systems building (20%):

• Design and build lean financial systems and processes that are specifically tailored to match the product stage and business model of each product
• Collaborate with product leaders to review and develop country-level finance systems that support optimum field delivery operations while establishing and promoting an appropriate control environment.
• Your work will ensure teams in the field can deliver with excellence, supported by robust financial practices.
• Develop financial systems that empower product and implementation teams to focus on what matters most at each stage: speed, quality, or scale by eliminating unnecessary procedures and enabling operational clarity.
• Create systems that evolve with the organization’s growth, ensuring efficiency without unnecessary complexity, and enable us to build and scale products that measurably improve the lives of millions of youth.

Strategic financial analysis (20%):

• Define and prioritize key financial metrics: Partner with the CEO, COO, the two business unit product executives to identify the most critical financial metrics for each product and stage of growth.
• Design and implement actionable systems: Lead the rollout of systems that translate complex financial data into clear, strategic insights for leadership decision-making.
• Enable leaders with practical financial tools: Equip operational and product leaders with intuitive financial models and core metrics they can actively use.
• Drive sustainable growth: Empower teams to make confident, strategic decisions that maximize financial sustainability and long-term impact for each product and program.

Compliance (10%):

• Partner with country teams to implement and monitor strict adherence to all risk management measures, internal controls, and financial regulations, including tax and human capital laws.
• Act on key reports and recommendations to strengthen and improve the organization’s financial ecosystem.
• Strategic Compliance Leadership: Ensure all critical compliance requirements are fully met, and lower-priority obligations are managed strategically, so that compliance matters never undermine organizational success.

External Reporting (10%):

• Lead financial forecasting and the creation, review, and analysis of reports to support strategic decision-making.
• Develop and review budgets for proposals and funder/payer reporting, ensuring accuracy, clarity, and timeliness.
• Deliver financial reporting to funders and the board that is reliable, transparent, and strategically framed, presenting complex budgets in the simplest, most understandable way for organization-wide clarity and efficiency.
• Streamline complex reporting processes to minimize time and effort while maintaining accuracy and insight.

Technology Leadership for Finance & Administration (15%):

• Drive continuous improvement of finance and administration systems by assessing team needs, auditing current processes, and researching industry best practices.
• Ensure global and country-level finance and admin functions leverage the most effective technology to operate efficiently, reduce costs, and strengthen overall financial sustainability.
• Lead technology initiatives that optimize workflows, increase productivity, and enhance the organization’s operational resilience.

Qualifications

• Experience: 6-10 years of strategic leadership experience, including oversight over strategic finance and operational systems. Specific finance leadership is NOT required – however oversight over finance systems and reporting, and strategic financial management experience is. Finance oriented management consultants, general managers, and strategy/operations leaders are encouraged to apply.
• Excellent interpersonal and collaboration skills for working with global leaders.
• Strategic problem-solving and problem ownership orientation
• Ability to apply financial modeling and simplicity in solution design to build lean finance systems that align with the organization’s strategy.
• Resonate with our Five Cultural Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below) and learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here.

Apply here