About the Academy

African Leadership Academy (ALA) seeks to create peace and prosperity on the African continent by identifying, developing, and connecting a new generation of young leaders. The Academy was founded on the philosophy that a new generation of ethical, committed leaders is the key to Africa’s development. Each year, ALA draws the most outstanding students from across Africa to its campus in South Africa. Here, they build a powerful intellectual foundation and develop their leadership capacity through ALA’s unique curriculum. ALA then works with these young leaders throughout their lives as they enable lasting positive change on the African continent.

Position Overview

In order to meet its bold mission of transforming the continent, ALA must maintain a reliable database of information about its alumni and about its impact. ALA uses the Salesforce CRM system to manage all alumni and impact data. The Data and Research Associate will work in the Institutional Learning team to help with a range of data capture tasks to ensure that the database is kept up to date. We are looking for a dedicated and focused individual with excellent attention to detail. The tasks in this role are repetitive and therefore we seek a candidate who is resilient, enjoys working with data and is committed to “getting it right”. This is a 3-month contract, working 100 hours per month, with the possibility of a further 3 to 6-month extension. They can work remotely provided they have reliable access to good quality internet or can choose to work fully or partly from ALA’s campus in Honeydew.

Primary Responsibilities

1. Keep the Alumni Database of 1600+ alumni in Salesforce up to date. This will require taking data predominantly from publicly accessible LinkedIn profiles and capturing in Salesforce, but at times will also require desktop research and triangulating data from a variety of sources.
2. Keep the jobs and internships data of 3000+ Mastercard Foundation scholars up to date in Salesforce.
3. Perform any other ad-hoc data capture and data reconciliation tasks as may be required.

Profile of the Ideal Candidate 

• Self-starter who takes initiative and who can work independently with minimal oversight.
• Exceptional attention to detail.
• Curious about data and a desire to make sense of the story being told by the data
• High tolerance for repetitive tasks.
• Excellent organisational and communication skills.
• Demonstrated ability to thrive and maintain a positive mind-set in a fast-paced environment.
• Previous Salesforce experience is not necessary but is an advantage.
• Must own your own laptop and have good-quality internet access for ~ 6hr per day.