Open Positions

Project Manager – Digitisation

Laws.Africa is hiring a Project Manager to plan and deliver the digitisation of African legal materials at scale: gazettes, judgments, legislation, and other bulk collections. The content this work produces reaches over a million people a year and supports the rule of law, business, government, and human rights across the continent. This is a project and people management role first. Our delivery runs across several countries, several teams, and a mix of internal staff and contractors. It succeeds or fails on whether somebody is holding the plan, the sequence, the handovers, and the deadlines. That is the job. You do not need digitisation experience. We will teach you our scanning workflows, quality standards, and tooling. What we cannot easily teach is running complex work to a deadline across several teams. If you have done that and can show us how, we want to hear from you.

Responsibilities

• The plan. Turn high-level priorities into work plans, schedules, and milestones across countries and projects, and scope new projects from start to finish
• The people. Allocate work to digitisation staff and contractors, track progress, give feedback, and keep distributed teams pulling in the same direction
• The quality bar. Maintain the checks that keep digitised content usable by our editorial, website, and product teams, and fix recurring problems through better documentation, guidance, and training
• The visibility. Report on throughput, turnaround times, error rates, and capacity, and escalate risks and delays early rather than late

How we work

• We are a small team that values ownership and clear accountability
• We work remotely, across South Africa, Kenya, and elsewhere
• We prioritise predictable delivery and follow-through over heroics
• We would rather hear about a problem early, with a proposed solution, than hear a reassurance that turns out to be wrong

Requirements

• Three or more years running projects from start to finish, with real accountability for the deadline and the outcome
• Evidence of delivering work that ran across more than one team, where the parts had to be sequenced rather than simply done in parallel
• Experience managing staff and contractors, including holding people to commitments when you have no authority to compel them
• Clear written communication; most of our coordination happens in writing
• The judgement to prioritise when everything looks urgent, and to raise problems early with a proposed solution
• Based in South Africa or Kenya, and able to travel nationally and internationally when required

Useful, but not required

• Formal project management training; we care considerably more about what you have delivered than about what you are certified in
• Experience with digitisation, publishing, data processing, or similar production pipelines
• Familiarity with legal or government content

How to apply

There are three parts to the application, and we will not consider an application that is missing any of them.

• Assignment: Complete the short planning assignment. It should take 60 to 90 minutes; please do not spend longer on it
• Cover letter: Write it in the application form
• CV: Include your CV with the submission

Submit all three parts through the application form. There is nothing to email. We read the assignment before we read the CV. If you have questions about the role, email jobs@laws.africa.

Position: Full-time
Location: South Africa or Kenya (remote)