Data Scientist

About this role

Educate! is East Africa’s largest youth employment and skills provider, having meaningfully impacted more than 500,000 youth across Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Tanzania. The organisation prepares young people to learn, earn and thrive through an employment-focused secondary school subject and livelihood boot camps for out-of-school youth, with a particular focus on marginalised rural girls and young women. Educate!

is seeking a Data Scientist who will sit at the intersection of social science theory and advanced analytics to solve the causal puzzles of youth success. This is a rare opportunity to apply rigorous analysis to design products that seek to transform the life trajectories of young people across Africa, with the mandate to build and codify the Data Science function from the ground up. Core responsibilities span three domains. First, the role involves theory-driven causal discovery, including constructing causal frameworks that map latent social mechanisms driving youth success, formulating and testing hypotheses to identify the why behind programme performance, and acting as a strategic partner to Product and Evaluation teams to identify high-leverage use cases where data-driven insights can fundamentally pivot programme design.

Second, the role requires building outcome-focused models to predict indicators such as student retention, livelihood gains and pedagogy adoption, employing advanced statistical tactics to examine heterogeneity of programme impact across demographics, and leading with a minimum viable model mindset. Third, the role entails strategic translation and insight, synthesising complex statistical findings into compelling narratives and visuals for non-technical leaders and government partners, co-creating with teams to deploy model outputs as A/B tests or product experiments, and establishing a unified framework for data storytelling that culminates in clear go or no-go decisions for stakeholders.