Project Associate

Job Title: Project Associate

Organization: Central Square Foundation

Department: Strategic Support States - Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN)

Location: Medchal/Vikarabad, Telangana

Central Square Foundation:

Founded in 2012, Central Square Foundation (CSF) is a non-profit philanthropic foundation working on 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 children's learning outcomes, especially in low-income communities.

Learn more about CSF by visiting our Website

About the team:

Foundational Learning (FL): Foundational Learning team at Central Square Foundation assists the States in designing and implementing the respective state missions to ensure FLN learning outcomes for children. Spread across five states, the Project Management Units (PMUs) of the team work closely with the state bodies in co-ideating goals for states FLN mission, identifying critical workstreams, setting indicators of success across the workstreams, and reviewing mission progress. Apart from these core activities, the FL team also conducts action research projects and pilots, context-specific programs to accelerate student learning.

CSFs work in Telangana:

CSF has been actively working with the Department of School Education (SCERT, Samagra Shiksha), Telangana, on its FLN mission ensuring that all children in Grades 1-5 receive quality education and achieve the desired FLN outcomes. To bring fidelity in the implementation of the mission, CSF has taken proactive steps to provide strategic support to select districts/regions. These interventions serve as demonstrative models to showcase how targeted strategies and coordinated efforts can bring about significant improvements in FLN outcomes within the given timeline.

CSF's interventions go beyond mere support; they involve strategic planning, capacity building, and continuous monitoring of the implementation process. By closely working with district administrators, grassroots NGOs, and local elected bodies, CSF aims to address implementation challenges, identify gaps, and prioritize areas that can drive significant improvements in FLN outcomes. These interventions serve as catalysts for change and provide valuable insights into effective implementation strategies that can be scaled up across the state.

Roles and Responsibilities of the Project Associate:

• Project Associates shall work closely with the District administrations of Medchal/Vikarabad district in creating and implementing detailed District Action Plan (DAP), collaborate with District Education Officers, Academic Monitoring Officers & District Resource Persons to enhance the processes and strengthen existing inputs of the FLN Mission, such as the use of Teaching Learning Materials, effective Teacher Professional Development & mentoring, dissemination of communication campaigns, and the effective monitoring systems as part of measuring outputs/outcomes.
• Conduct school visits on a regular basis in the district.
• Conduct small-scale pilot interventions (which are not part of the existing inputs) in the district to solve complex problems or problems specific to the district.
• Align district-level strategies and interventions with the overarching goals and directives of the state FLN mission.
• Work closely with Middle management (Mandal Education Officers and Cluster Head Masters) and to build their capacity to provide support to teachers and review project progress.
• Ensure state level governance structures (like review meetings) cascade effectively and function well at the district, block and cluster level.
• Collaborate closely with the state team to ensure coherence and integration of efforts, sharing insights and progress updates regularly.

Other key responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

Providing efficiencies to implementation

• Deeper and grassroot-level diagnostic of WHAT and WHY of the gaps and problem-solving
• Ground level feedback
• Design and/or execute district/mandal level strategies/solutions
• Build local capacities for adoption and usage
• Conduct awareness campaigns/events on FLN across the schools/clusters/mandals/district

Data monitoring and Progress check

• Conduct field trials to get ground feedback on monitoring system, and work closely with District to fix the gaps
• Ensure consistent data collection, develop and maintain the Management Information System (MIS), analyze data to generate insights, and drive actionable outcomes.
• Improve data quality & reliability including independent data collection on KPIs, conduct pilot studies aimed at improving the same

Pilot Projects to test innovative models

• Implement pilot projects and test models for community/parental engagement
• Implement pilot projects and test solutions on key challenges such as MGML
• Work with District Admin. in the implementation of tech based Continuous Professional Development
• Design and rollout to modules for capacity building of stakeholders (teachers/ mentors/ parents)
• Design and implement interventions that promote holistic development in children.

Documentation & Reporting

• Prepare timely and accurate reports, documenting the program progress, achievements, challenges, and financial utilization
• Document the quantitative and qualitative impact/outcomes of each and every intervention at the district level

The Project Associates will execute projects to stabilise outputs across FLN workstreams with the goal to improve process KPIs and learning outcomes

Required Qualifications, Skills and Abilities

• Bachelors degree; a Masters degree preferred (in education, development studies, public policy, and social sciences)
• 0-2 years of work experience preferably in the education sector demonstrating remarkable project delivery and stakeholder management
• Demonstrated skills in data and measurement (quantitative and qualitative), including design of tools and strategies for data collection, data visualisation, drawing analysis and insights, and reporting and presentation
• Prior experience working with state and district-level governance and institutional structures is highly desirable
• Ability to undertake field travel (schools, clusters, mandals) for at least 15 days in a month
• Keen interest in the Development/Education sector
• Fluent in both Telugu and English with excellent written and oral communication skills
• Knowledge and experience in project management, including large-scale program implementation with multiple delivery tracks and monitoring
• Strong skills in stakeholder management, problem-solving, and analytical thinking
• Proven ability to thrive in ambiguous and evolving environments

Compensation

Remuneration will be competitive with Indian philanthropy pay scales and will depend upon the candidates experience levels.

Skills Required
Project Management, Data Collection, Stakeholder Management