🌍 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.
Do you have a passion for solving technology challenges and creating a seamless user experience? Educate! is looking for a proactive and detail-oriented Tech Support Officer to serve as the first line of support for our growing suite of digital products, including our WhatsApp coaching bot, chat web applications, SMS, and USSD platforms. In this role, you will be the central point of contact for all user-reported issues, ensuring every concern is accurately triaged, coordinated with the right stakeholders, and driven through to resolution. You will keep both youth participants and frontline staff informed throughout the process, helping maintain trust and confidence in our digital products. If you thrive in a fast-paced environment, enjoy problem-solving, and are passionate about delivering high-quality support that enables technology teams to focus on innovation, this role is for you.
What You’ll Do🌟Cross Functional Collaboration:
- Provide first-line support across digital channels: the WhatsApp coaching bot, chat webapps, SMS flows, and USSD entry points (once live).
- Respond to incidents and change requests in line with agreed SLAs. Keep users updated on resolution status throughout.
- Triage and resolve issues reported by youth (directly in-app once flagging ships, or via Business Advisors), or escalate to engineering with enough context for them to act without re-investigating.
- Assist youth and Business Advisors with usage guidance, feature explanations, and recovery from common issues (sign-in, lost chat history, missed nudges).
- Conduct follow-ups with youth, frontline teams after escalation to confirm the issue is resolved end to end, not just closed in the ticket.
- Maintain high levels of user satisfaction through clear communication and consistent service delivery.
- Ensure efficient resolution of youth and frontline teams issues to minimise operational disruption.
- Adhere to operational guidelines to reduce losses from silent service failures, missed nudges, and undelivered messages.
- Work closely with the Product Owner (Tech) and engineering team to keep the support workflow current as the Product evolves.
- Provide assistance to Operations in maintaining vendor relationships and performance for tech vendors including tracking of invoice accuracy and timely uploading
- Conduct training and onboard new tech-team joiners to the support workflow, ticketing standards, and the incident response runbook.
- Any other roles as as assigned to by the line manager
Documentation and Triaging:
- Document every interaction, issue, and resolution in Jira (the Tech board) using the agreed templates.
- Share logs, screenshots, and reproduction steps with engineers for technical troubleshooting.
- Conduct routine health checks across digital channels (WhatsApp message delivery, SMS routing, web app sign-in, USSD path) to identify and flag operational anomalies before users report them.
- Proactively flag recurring issues so the engineering team can address them at the root.
- Identify and act on potential risks within the support function (alert blind spots, single-points-of-failure, compliance drift, recurring fragility) and escalate appropriately.
- Author and maintain an up-to-date knowledge base of support processes, runbooks for the top recurring issues, and FAQs for Business Advisors and youth-facing teams.
- Education: Degree in any related business field
- Experience (Non-negotiable):
- Minimum of 1 or 2 years of experience in a technical support
- Demonstrated experience and some hands-on familiarity with ticketing systems (Jira, Linear, Zendesk, or similar).
- Experience supporting digital products that serve large user bases is an added advantage.
- Key Skills:
- Proficiency in support ticketing systems and basic data tooling.
- Strong time management and the ability to prioritise across competing urgent issues.
- Calm under pressure: Will be the first responder when something on production is on fire.
- Youth-first approach: Empathy and patience for the user, many of whom are first-time users of digital coaching.
- Excellent written and verbal communication: Will be writing ticket updates, BA replies, and youth-facing responses every day.
- Troubleshooting and problem-solving
- Strong ticket discipline.
- Must have a strong sense of agility
- Owns the operational work: Wants to do the discipline of triage and follow-up well
- Fits our Five Culture Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here
- A vibrant, mission-driven environment with a supportive and fun team.
- Learning & growth opportunities
Application Process: Rolling basis, interviews happening soon!
Terms- Preferred duty station is in our office in Nairobi, Kenya.
- Compensation will be competitive for the social enterprise sector and commensurate with experience
- Benefits include health insurance and a generous vacation policy
We’re ambitious. Are you? Educate! is growing fast, so new opportunities are opening up and expanding all the time. We’re inspired by people with drive, and we love to help them reach their full potential. We expect everyone at Educate! to contribute above and beyond their job description, grow their skills, and advance their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey of their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey.
- We put Youth First, Impact-Obsessed - We are purpose-driven, focused on impact, and prioritize what truly matters. We listen to youth, design our efforts around their needs, and ensure every dollar creates transformative experiences they value.
- We Exceed Expectations - We take pride in going above and beyond to achieve the best results—proactively identifying problems and seeking solutions without waiting or stopping at what's requested.
- We Are Always Learning - We are committed to seeking and applying new knowledge and ideas. We stay open-minded and continuously try new things, experiment, grow, and improve. We invest in learning for ourselves and our teams.
- We are One Team, Many Views - We value all individuals, believe diverse ideas and open dialogue drive excellence, foster a supportive and respectful environment where everyone can freely express themselves. We work as one team and prioritize the organization's mission over personal or team interests.
- We have the Startup Mindset - We innovate relentlessly to grow our impact, we never think “we have arrived” or “we’re done.”We constantly challenge the status quo, embrace change, and move quickly toward our vision. Unafraid of failure, we question anything that hinders progress.
Every person at Educate! — from interns to the executive director — is evaluated by how they live up to these five cultural tenets. They are at the core of how we achieve our mission and why we work as well as we do. Educate is committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all who interact in our community. In creating this environment, we encourage people from a variety of cultures, backgrounds and life experiences to join our diverse team.
We’re committed to ensuring all candidates are screened for child and youth safety. As part of the process, you’ll need to provide a Certificate of Good Conduct. Educate! reserves the right to withdraw employment offers if any risks to youth are identified.
