Senior Program Associate, Education for Education (EfE)

The Education for Education (EfE) program is built around volunteers, that is, youth and mothers from the community, who support children’s learning in their villages. In return for their participation, volunteers receive vocational and educational courses and other learning opportunities throughout the year. The aim is for volunteers to see pathways for their own growth, learn new skills, and gain experiences that are valuable to them. When these activities are linked together, they sustain a learning environment for children while moving ownership of that environment to the community.

The role will provide overall support for Education for Employment (EfE) across Pratham, positioning it as a cross-cutting initiative that runs across programs and states. The role will be responsible for shaping the strategic direction of EfE, ensuring that volunteers across different program verticals have meaningful learning opportunities that support both their contribution to Pratham and their own development.

Key responsibilities include developing the annual EfE strategy and course calendar, leading the design and rollout of courses based on volunteers’ needs and aspirations, and building partnerships with external organisations that can contribute learning opportunities through Pratham’s platform. The role will also support and mentor the network of state EfE Coordinators, work closely with the relevant teams to strengthen platforms and data systems, and regularly review implementation, participation, and outcomes across states to inform continuous improvement. This role requires someone who is equally comfortable thinking strategically and working closely with implementation teams. The ideal candidate should be able to translate a long-term vision into practical systems, collaborate across functions and states, and solve implementation challenges while ensuring that EfE continues to evolve as a high-quality, scalable initiative across the organisation.

Vision and cross-program integration: Establish EfE as a common thread across all of Pratham’s programs. Work with program leads in every vertical so that any volunteer, in any program, can access EfE courses and opportunities, and so that participation, retention, and community ownership grow stronger wherever Pratham works.

Program strategy and planning: Lead the national EfE roadmap: identify learning needs across programs and stakeholders, and plan the rollout of EfE offerings across states, programs, and geographies. Work with program and state teams to determine where each offering is most relevant and when it should be delivered .

Understanding volunteer needs: Build an evidence-based picture of who Pratham’s volunteers are and what they need, across programs and states. Use this to decide which courses to offer, which to adapt, and which to drop.

Course design and content: Coordinate with internal and external teams to design, pilot, refine, and finalize learning offerings. Facilitate pilots, gather user feedback and insights, and oversee translation and adaptation, including for WhatsApp delivery, to ensure quality across languages and contexts.

Partnerships with other organizations: Identify and build relationships with organisations, institutions, and course providers whose offerings fit Pratham’s volunteers, whether vocational, educational, or certification linked. Assess their content and delivery models, negotiate terms of collaboration, and work with the digital team to onboard partner courses onto Pratham’s platform so volunteers can access them seamlessly. Manage these partnerships on an ongoing basis, including quality review, data sharing, and renewal decisions.

Expert engagement: Arrange expert calls and sessions for courses, and build a bench of resource people who can strengthen course offerings.

Leading the EfE team: Guide state EfE Coordinators in setting priorities, work plans, and progress review. Anchor each course cycle across states from launch to completion, run regular review, feedback, and next steps meetings with state coordinators.

Digital platforms and data: Work with the relevant teams to strengthen the existing platform and the enrollment and assessment systems. Make sure data from every course cycle is analysed, and shared with the teams who need it.

Outcomes and evidence: Analyse enrollment, participation, and completion trends alongside what volunteers actually gain from each learning opportunity. Develop simple follow-up systems for state teams to engage volunteers after courses end, and build the evidence base on how EfE influences their knowledge, practice, and continued engagement.

Issue resolution: Serve as the escalation point for program, data, and technology issues raised by states, and work with the relevant central teams to close them quickly.

Documentation and reporting: Document progress, learnings, and outcomes, and prepare reports and presentations for leadership and partners.

Budgeting: Plan and manage the annual EfE budget, including course development, training, technology, and state-level delivery costs. Track spending against plan and donor grants; work with state teams on their EfE budget lines; prepare budgets for proposals, etc

Field visits: Make regular field visits to states a planned part of the role rather than a response to problems. Observe courses in progress, meet the field teams running them, and see how the content and platform hold up at the ground level. Connect directly with volunteers, including those who dropped off partway, about content, timing, language, assessments, and what the courses are opening up for them. Record each visit in a consistent format, share it with program teams, and make sure it informs course revisions, training design, and rollout planning.

The selected applicant will report to the Lead, Operations, Direct Elementary Programs