ALG Head of Impact

Are you a rigorous impact leader who can build trusted evidence systems at scale? Do you know how to combine world-class evaluation methods with the speed and pragmatism of a high-growth organization? Are you equally comfortable discussing RCTs, sampling, confidence intervals, and causal inference as you are working with product, data, fundraising, and executive teams to turn evidence into better decisions, stronger donor confidence, and more powerful learner outcomes?

Do you want to help build one of the most trusted, scalable impact engines in education and workforce development?

About ALG

The African Leadership Group is a family of mission-aligned institutions building one of the world’s most ambitious pipelines of ethical, entrepreneurial talent. Founded by Fred Swaniker in 2004, ALG has spent over two decades creating education and career pathways that identify overlooked potential, develop it through applied learning, and connect it to real opportunity -- from African Leadership Academy’s early leadership development, to African Leadership University’s mission-driven higher education, to ALX’s high-scale workforce training. Across this ecosystem, ALG is working toward a bold mission: developing 3 million leaders by 2035. To date, the Group has raised more than $1.7 billion in philanthropic support, graduated 373,000+ leaders across 50+ countries, supported the development of 10,000+ ventures, and demonstrated that high-quality, career-connected education can change trajectories at scale.

Role Summary

ALU and the broader African Leadership Group (ALG) are entering a new phase of growth. We have demonstrated the ability to scale rapidly, reach learners across the continent, and generate meaningful early outcomes.

We are looking for a Head of Impact to build the rigorous, scalable, externally credible impact engine that will support ALG’s next chapter. This role will lead the evolution of our Impact function from a reporting and monitoring function into a world-class evidence, learning, validation, and impact intelligence capability.

The mandate is ambitious: to make ALG one of the most trusted organizations in education and workforce development for impact quality, transparency, data integrity, and external validation.

This leader will own the systems, methods, partnerships, collateral, and team needed to make our impact claims audit-ready, donor-ready, decision-ready, and, where appropriate, publication-ready. They will help the organization move beyond short-term placement statistics toward a deeper understanding of income lift, economic mobility, career progression, promotions, entrepreneurship, household uplift, family support, resilience, and long-term opportunity.

The right candidate will bring deep expertise in rigorous impact methodology, including RCTs, quasi-experimental methods, longitudinal studies, sampling, survey design, and causal inference, while also being able to operate in ALG’s fast-moving, entrepreneurial environment. This is not a slow academic research role, nor is it a traditional M&E compliance role. It is a senior builder role for someone who can bring rigor without rigidity, structure without bureaucracy, and external credibility without slowing down innovation.

Specific Responsibilities

Build the evidence and trust architecture

Build the trust infrastructure for ALG’s next phase of scale: the methodologies, systems, validation partnerships, dashboards, governance, and public-facing evidence needed to make our impact claims credible under scrutiny

Develop and own ALG’s impact methodology, including approaches to data collection, verification, sampling, extrapolation, attribution, contribution, confidence intervals, error margins, data quality, and limitations

Define the standards for what ALG can claim internally, what can be shared with donors, what requires caveats, and what is ready for external publication or independent validation

Move ALG’s impact narrative beyond short-term placement statistics to include income lift, economic mobility, promotions, entrepreneurship, household uplift, family support, resilience, and long-term career progression

Strengthen internal alignment around core impact definitions, metrics, data sources, reporting standards, and evidence thresholds, ensuring leadership, fundraising, product, and program teams are working from a single source of truth.

Lead rigorous evaluation and external validation

Design and lead a rigorous research and evaluation agenda, including RCTs, quasi-experimental studies, tracer studies, longitudinal research, employer studies, learner surveys, and mixed-methods evaluation.

Identify which research methods are appropriate for different programs, geographies, and questions — balancing gold-standard rigor with the practical realities of a fast-moving, scaled organization.

Build partnerships with credible external validators, researchers, economists, evaluation firms, academic institutions, and research labs to strengthen public and donor confidence in ALG’s impact.

Create a roadmap for when, where, and how ALG should pursue external validation, publish findings, commission independent evaluations, or subject its methodology to external review.

Ensure external validation efforts are directly connected to organizational learning, fundraising, program improvement, and public trust, not research for research’s sake

Build impact intelligence systems and data quality

Partner with Data, Product, Engineering, Learning, Community, and Operations teams to embed impact measurement across the learner journey, from registration and baselines through program completion, transition into work, long-term outcomes, and alumni progression

Strengthen data pipelines and verification systems across surveys, platform data, CRM tools, employer feedback, relationship manager inputs, alumni updates, financial or KYC rails, LinkedIn/digital trace data, and other relevant sources.

Build QA and governance systems that make impact data audit-ready, including audit trails, anomaly detection, dashboard health checks, data dictionaries, internal controls, documentation, and clear ownership for core metrics.

Ensure dashboards and data products are reliable, donor-friendly, methodologically clear, and able to distinguish between actuals, estimates, projections, and externally validated outcomes

Work with technical teams to make impact data useful for decision-making, not just reporting, including predictive insights, segmentation, learner support interventions, and program improvement

Turn evidence into learning, fundraising, and thought leadership

Develop donor-facing and public-facing collateral that clearly explains ALG’s evidence standards, collection methods, verification layers, sampling approach, extrapolation logic, audit protocols, and methodological limitations

Partner with Fundraising and Partnerships to create credible impact assets for major donors, institutional funders, governments, employers, and strategic partners

Produce or oversee white papers, methodology briefs, board materials, impact reports, donor evidence packs, and thought leadership on ALG’s approach to economic mobility, AI-era workforce development, youth employment, entrepreneurship, household uplift, and durable career resilience

Lead a practical learning agenda that identifies the highest-value questions ALG must answer to improve outcomes, strengthen funder confidence, and scale responsibly

Translate impact data into actionable insights that improve learner experience, program design, community support, employer engagement, fundraising, and long-term outcomes

Lead and evolve the Impact Team

Lead and strengthen the Impact Team, building a culture that is rigorous, fast, transparent, ethical, analytical, and deeply connected to organizational strategy

Build the team’s capabilities across impact evaluation, data quality, analytics, s