Fractional Senior People Advisor

Role Overview

Educate! is hiring a Fractional Senior People Advisor to sit alongside the CEO and executive team as their most experienced people counsel. This is a part-time, fully remote engagement of roughly 10–12 hours a week, and it is deliberately advisory rather than operational: the Global People & HR Director owns the people function, while you own the harder conversations that happen above it. With more than 300 staff spread across Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania, the questions that reach the executive table are rarely administrative — they are about scaling across borders, applying policy and employment law in ways that protect both the organisation and the individuals in it, and communicating decisions in a way people can get behind.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as a senior people business partner to the CEO and executive team, being the person they call before a high-stakes decision is made rather than after it has landed.
• Offer an independent perspective on organisational design, team composition and succession as the organisation grows in size, geography and complexity.
• Stress-test proposals before they are committed to, surfacing the commercial, legal, cultural and trust-related risks that internal stakeholders may be too close to see.
• Translate global people policy and the employment law of Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania into practical options for the executive team — setting out what is permissible, what it costs, and what it does to the relationship with staff.
• Advise on live, consequential cases including restructures, exits, performance situations, grievances and investigations spanning multiple countries.
• Exercise judgement about where a single global standard should hold and where local context should change how it is applied.
• Coach individual team members through the interpersonal and cross-cultural dynamics of a matrixed, multi-country organisation, and design or facilitate working sessions when a team is stuck.
• Shape and edit the messaging around restructures, policy changes and leadership transitions — advising on what to say, what to hold back, and the right moment to say it — so internal communications read as clear, honest and consistent with how the organisation describes itself.

Requirements & Qualifications

• At least 8 years in senior HR, people or organisational development roles, which may include leading people at a startup, acting as an HR business partner to an executive team, or advising a CEO directly.
• Demonstrated ability to read a complex people situation quickly and identify what policy and employment law actually allow, not just what is theoretically possible.
• Experience advising on restructures, exits, performance management, grievances and investigations, ideally across more than one country or legal jurisdiction.
• Strong written communication: the ability to take a difficult people decision and turn it into a message that people accept and understand.
• Comfort operating as the outside voice — direct with senior leaders, discreet with what you hear, and content not to be the person who executes.
• Sound judgement about confidentiality, escalation and the difference between a global standard and a locally adapted one.