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Data Systems, Quality & Governance Specialist

SmartStart
Remote, South Africa
Closing Date:
Friday, 7 November 2025
Open

About the Organisation

SmartStart is a successful national network of NGOs & partners realising quality, affordable early learning for all 3-5 year olds — through scaling a network of providers, and achieving specific ecosystem transformations with governments and partners.

About the Job

SmartStart is committed to improving early childhood outcomes in South Africa through a scalable social franchise model. The Data Systems, Quality & Governance Specialist will play a central role in strengthening the organisation’s data systems and processes to support effective programme delivery. The role is primarily responsible for ensuring the quality, consistency, and usability of data across SmartStart. The incumbent will lead efforts to improve data tools, streamline data workflows, and embed good data practices across teams. They will also support analysis and dashboard development to enable timely insights, while helping build internal capacity for data use and governance.

Key Responsibilities

Data Governance and Quality Assurance

  • Design, operationalise and oversee the data governance function within the organisation.

  • Enable and support data governance processes, including data availability, accessibility, integrity, quality (including accuracy, consistency, and reliability), usability, security, and compliance (in collaboration with IT and legal teams).

  • Assist with regular data cleaning and quality checks to ensure high data integrity

  • Develop and maintain documentation, SOPs, and metadata to support consistent and high-quality data management.

  • Design data quality dashboards and set up regular monitoring and review alerts.

  • Work within the organisation to enhance data literacy, improve existing data processes and workflows and support future data process design and development.

  • Work across teams to roll out data quality improvement plans, design processes to collect missing data or improve data accuracy.

  • Facilitate cross-functional collaboration to improve data practices, including onboarding sessions, governance workshops, and learning events.

  • Conduct assessments of key data assets and identify potential risks or gaps, including data process mapping.

  • Coordinate and lead data governance efforts, including defining data ownership, steward roles, and accountability structures across operational teams.

  • Support product stewardship for key data platforms, ensuring alignment between data processes, user needs, and platform functionality.

  • Lead or support change management processes for data tools and structures, ensuring stakeholder alignment and minimising disruption.

  • Monitor data hygiene and escalate discrepancies to the relevant team members.


Data Analysis and Insights Generation

  • Conduct data analysis to support strategic decision-making and programme improvements.

  • Respond to data requests from programme teams and leadership.

  • Conduct routine data checks to ensure data integrity.

  • Identify patterns and trends in data and provide clear summaries for different audiences.

  • Support the preparation of data insights briefs and reports.

  • Create, enhance and support the use of interactive dashboards and analytics tools to improve datadriven decision-making across the organisation and network.


Supporting Organisational Learning and Adaptive Strategy

  • Assist with enabling teams to leverage insights for learning and programme improvement.

  • Contribute to rapid experimentation by supporting data collection and analysis processes.

  • Support the delivery of basic data literacy training across the organisation to improve data engagement and interpretation.

  • Support teams to improve data capturing, quality assurance and related processes.

  • Translate data insights into accessible formats for programme teams and leadership.


Research and Evaluation Support

  • Support the Senior Data Analyst and Research team with research design, data analysis, and interpretation.

  • Assist in co-conceptualising and co-creating research and evaluation questions, studies, and terms of reference.

  • Provide input into research reports and recommendations.

Requirements

Essential Skills and Experience

  • A minimum of a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Social Sciences, Economics, Mathematics, or a related field.

  • At least 6-8 years of experience in data analysis, data management or a related field, including experience where you have had ownership over the data process, and demonstrable leadership experience.

  • Strong quantitative and analytical skills

  • A curious approach to technology, with interest and experience working across multiple tools to solve organisational challenges.

  • Excellent knowledge of and ability to work with SQL databases.

  • Experience with data visualisation tools (e.g., Power BI, Tableau).

  • Ability to summarise data insights and communicate findings to non-technical audiences.

  • Experience in managing and working with large datasets.

  • Strong attention to detail and accuracy.


Desirable

  • Knowledge of statistical principles, especially relating to designing and running randomised control trials.

  • Experience working in a social impact or nonprofit context.

  • Proficiency in Excel and at least one statistical tool (e.g., Stata, R, SPSS).

  • Familiarity with survey software (e.g. SurveyCTO), CRMs (Microsoft Dynamics), and Azure.

  • Basic knowledge of data process mapping and workflow optimisation.

  • Knowledge of automation using code and/or workflow tools (Make.com, Zapier, Power Automate etc.)


General Knowledge & Understanding and/or Skills & Abilities

Behaving & Learning:

  • Behaving trustworthily: being reliable, accepting, open, congruent (ie. integrity)

  • Learning curiously, incl. learning how by doing differently

  • Clear curiosity (asking questions, questioning assumptions, doing differently, trying things)

  • Track record of learning

  • Openness to & appetite for feedback

  • Familiarity with and curiosity about

  • Societal scale

  • Systems doing-and-thinking

  • Design thinking & iterative designing

  • Driving to succeed

  • Commitment to SmartStart’s purpose and social justice internationally

  • Advantageous: experience in, or familiarity with, early learning, ECD, education, public health, etc.


Relating & Adapting

  • Building trusting relationships

  • Playing role(s)-across-contexts adaptively

  • Creating the conditions for and facilitating people’s thinking diversely and doing good work together

  • Co-building & communicating coherence unendingly

  • Reprioritising continually


Developing Self

  • Acknowledging one’s own relative strengths (& weaknesses)

  • Seeing & navigating rhetoric vs reality

  • Navigating ambiguity

  • Coping with stress caused by the above


Developing Systems Doing-and-Thinking

Seeing, synthesising, sense-making and influencing

  • The big picture / story, incl. emergent phenomena

  • The relations between wholes & parts

  • Patterns across space and over time

  • Feedback loops (circular causation)

  • Boundaries and working across them appropriately


Sophisticated problem-solving, incl. distinguishing complicated from complex problems & contexts

  • Scan & synthesise disparate sources of information

  • If complicated: sense-analyse-respond

  • If complex: probe-sense-respond

To apply

To apply, email your application by Friday 7th November 2025 to callum@actionappointments.co.za

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