Central Square Foundation - Project Lead - Policy & Research

Position: Project Lead (Policy & Research) - EdTech

Team: Education Technology (EdTech)

Location: Delhi

Founded in 2012, Central Square Foundation (CSF) 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.

About the team and role:

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.

Our EdTech work is structured around four broad pillars: (i) creation of public goods to improve the quality of the supply, (ii) providing grants to build the capacity of early-stage organizations that cater to the target population, (iii) building evidence on the efficacy of different EdTech solutions to understand what works and what doesn't, through government testbeds and by driving innovation within government systems by reforming public policy advocacy and (iv) strengthening government capacity to enable sustainable large-scale adoption. Through our combined efforts, we ensure that our programs and partners take a data and evidence-based approach so that we have a better understanding of what works (and doesn't), learn from them, and course-correct, as necessary

The Project Lead - Policy and Research, EdTech will be responsible for driving the evidence generation and policy agenda for EdTech. A growing body of evidence from around the world shows that EdTech has the potential to support learning for all stakeholders in the teaching and learning process. However, the effective implementation of high-quality EdTech products, particularly for low-income populations, is hampered by the lack of evidence for this context. 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 in this lack of evidence. One of the ways the team is envisioning this is to set up a lab that will attract researchers to conduct rapid evaluations of EdTech products.

The Project Lead will have to develop and manage relationships with policy-makers, researchers, grantee organizations, implementation partners, or any other organization CSF may support to conceptualize and execute the new lab, and 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/Director, EdTech.

Key responsibilities:

The candidate's key responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

Research & evaluation:

Support and lead the growing EdTech portfolio to build rigorous evidence around different models of implementation

- Lead the EdTech evidence generation portfolio, including identifying the evaluation objectives, identifying and on-board agencies, conceptualizing and managing implementation/evaluations for portfolio partners end-to-end, i.e. from design to execution and reporting phases, disseminating findings, etc.

- Conceptualize, design, and implement an evaluation "lab" for rapid EdTech product evaluations. In this capacity, the Project Lead will be engaging with different stakeholders, supporting fundraising, working with partners/teams to identify products, sites, etc.

- Conceptualize and define dashboards for EdTech partners that can facilitate data use and decision making for implementation/evaluation

- Identify and onboard key evaluation partners for EdTech programs, and manage the commissioning of the evaluation process through an external party (agency/researcher)

- Build a pipeline of researchers - globally and in India - to seek advisory/lead the EdTech evaluations in India

- Conduct policy research around EdTech policies and regulations in India to inform the Foundation's advocacy efforts

- Prepare briefs and concept notes on key EdTech policy developments in India to support the Foundation's advocacy efforts

- Create research papers, advocacy notes to share results from evaluations in the ecosystem

Required qualifications, skills, and abilities:

- Minimum requirement of Master's degree in relevant fields, including economics, public/education policy, or any related field

- 5-8 years of relevant experience in the designing and implementation of Monitoring and Evaluation in development projects/contexts.

- Strong understanding of concepts like Logic Model/Logical Framework, Theory of Change, major evaluation methodologies (experimental and non-experimental), and monitoring

- Ability to be able to set priorities, plan timelines and meet deadlines

- Ability to understand complex research/data to draw actionable inferences

- Ability to translate inferences to policy recommendations

- Excellent writing and presentation skills

Preferred experience :

- Experience in conducting evaluations/research studies, from designing the study to its implementation, analysis, and presentation of results and recommendations

- Experience in analyzing data using statistical tools and packages (Excel, Stata, R)

- Experience in the education/EdTech sector, especially in monitoring and evaluation roles