Senior Writer

About us

Our mission is to get preschool children in rural Africa to thrive. That’s where Lively Minds comes in. We have developed an award-winning Early Childhood Development programme that has been proven through randomised control trial to improve cognitive and socio-emotional skills and reduce malnutrition for pre-schoolers in hard-to-reach communities, so they have a greater chance of succeeding in school and in life. The programme provides marginalised Mothers with a parenting course and weekly radio broadcasts that empowers them to run educational Play Schemes for pre-schoolers and to provide better home-based care, using cheap local resources. The programme is delivered through government partners, is cheap and highly scalable. It genuinely has the potential to play a transformative role in ending the global ECD crisis.

We are extremely proud that the Government of Ghana have now adopted the programme and we have a ground-breaking partnership with them to support them to institutionalise it, fund it and to scale it to 60 education districts, reaching over 4000 communities and 1million children. In addition, an award-winning international research team are conducting a further randomised control trial to help us understand its impacts at scale. We are now turning our attention to scaling the programme nationwide across Ghana, scaling up the radio in it’s own right and moving to new countries.

We’re a lively ambitious organisation, determined to have a major positive impact on the world. We work hard at a fast pace, in a challenging environment. We expect everyone to give their best to achieve the best possible results. Our work is demanding but provides plenty of opportunity for innovation, responsibility, growth, collaboration, creativity and fun. We want all staff to be happy, fulfilled and to feel appreciated and valued in their work.

About the role

Our current annual budget is approximately £5m and we plan to double this over the next few years to support our expansion ambitions. The majority of our funding is currently from grants (trusts, foundations and institutional grants) and we see this income-stream being the main way to fund our expansion plans.

The Senior Writer will be required to support fundraising efforts through donor reporting, impact reporting, proposal writing and applications for challenge events, awards and speaking engagements.

In addition, the postholder will develop high quality communications and advocacy collateral that showcase the organisation, our impact and our approach to policy-makers, funders, practitioners and other stakeholders.

This is a unique opportunity for an ambitious writer to join a fun, high impact, mission driven organisation.