2021
Year End Update From the very beginning of Educate!, we have been driven by the belief that by combining skills training with practical experience and access to mentorship, we could enable youth to unlock pathways for their growth. In 2009, we began delivering a skills-focused model directly to youth in schools in Uganda — creating a space where youth can learn and build new skills through practical, hands-on activities. Since then, we’ve set up partnerships that allow us to scale this core experience through national education systems, adapt it for remote learning, and deliver our proven model to youth who cannot access traditional secondary school.
Distance learning participant Patrick at his handbag shop
Impact Multiplied:
How Joan Is Creating a Pathway for Herself and Other Women in Her Community Despite learning from experience that women are capable of anything, when Joan entered secondary school, she started to feel like she didn’t belong. “A group of ladies were undermining my mum’s ability to see me through school and envisioned me being married off. But later, I was lucky enough that other people in the community held my hand. I was able to complete lower secondary school. While in upper secondary, I had to defy all odds by working so hard to become a scientist. This was the basis of my effort and my continuous drive.” Thanks to Joan’s perseverance, the network of support she created for herself, and the skills she’s honed through Educate!, today, Joan is a small business owner, a lab technician student, and an incredible mentor. (Continued on page 3)
Having established that the Educate! approach to skills-based education significantly impacts youth when we deliver it to students ourselves, we devoted our energy towards exploring how we might make this experience available to more young people. We began to consider the potential of embedding this approach into national curricula.
Partnering
Governments
With the evidence of our original in-school model in hand, might governments have any interest in using it to improve the education their youth receive? And if so, could that new curriculum improve graduates’ lives? The progress here is promising. We learned recently that by reforming a single academic subject, we can significantly impact their life outcomes, including doubling their likelihood of enrolling in university and a 167% increase for girls alone. We believe that secondary school offers the most costeffective way for youth to learn and practice the skills that they will need to thrive in life after school. Over the last nine years, we’ve partnered with governments to integrate skills-based learning opportunities into national education systems — all in an effort to improve outcomes for young people at scale.
Partnering to Achieve System-wide Impact
Educate! has developed a first-of-its-kind, evidencedriven approach to education reform. Our systemschange strategy aims to ensure that changes in national education policy or curricula translate into meaningful changes for students in the classroom.
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Reform Policy: First, we work alongside government partners to incorporate the skills-based learning activities that we believe drive impact, such as student business clubs and learner-centered pedagogy, into the national curriculum of a single subject.
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Train Teachers: To encourage the uptake and adoption
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Embed Sustainability Tools & Structures: Lastly,
of this policy change, we then collaborate with the relevant education ministries to ensure educators receive the training and support they need to deliver the updated, skills-focused curriculum and its accompanying hands-on learning activities.
we continue to work with government stakeholders to identify and integrate structures to help schools and teachers sustain the new curriculum and teaching style, like assessment reforms which aim to ensure student evaluations are also learner-centered and that teachers and staff can easily put them into practice. (Continued on page 2)
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Co-Creating Youth Opportunities at Scale
Youth
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Partnering
Co-Creating Youth Opportunities at Scale After completing all three stages, Educate! will exit this education system support role. Government administrators and teachers will have the tools and experience to deliver this evidence-based learning experience.
Evaluating the Impact of SingleSubject Reform in Rwanda In 2015, Educate! received an invitation from Rwanda’s Ministry of Education to leverage what we learned working with youth directly in Uganda to strengthen the impact of secondary school in Rwanda: an opportunity to pilot our 3-stage approach to education reform.
To evaluate the impact of this systems-change approach on students, we partnered with Rwanda Education Board, Akazi Kanoze Access, and researchers from the World Bank, Oregon State University, and Innovations for Poverty Action to launch a randomized controlled trial (RCT).
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Reform Policy
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Cross-Team Partnerships
Our big takeaway: By partnering with government stakeholders to reform a single subject, we can create significant impact on youth through the education system.
By partnering with government stakeholders to reform a single subject, we can create significant impact on youth through the education system.
We worked together with the Rwandan government and partner organizations to (1) update Rwanda’s secondary-level entrepreneurship curriculum, (2) create teacher trainings to support their understanding and uptake of the reform, and (3) ensure teachers and administrators can easily continue delivering this updated curriculum and pedagogy to students.
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(Continued from page 1)
The results are an exciting confirmation of our 3-stage approach to improving the quality of secondary education. This single-subject reform in Rwanda offers a new pathway to improved student-level outcomes, like access to university and a 16% increase in business ownership for young women, and at a faster rate and lower cost than more comprehensive reforms like universal access, especially as investments in secondary school continue to lag behind primary.
With this encouraging evidence in hand, we are eager to deepen and expand our partnerships to support other governments to achieve our shared goals in better-preparing youth for life after school. We’re looking forward to seeing what the future holds for co-created, single-subject reforms and the generations of youth that can benefit from them.
Train Teachers
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Embed Sustainability Tools & Structures
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Practical Learning Experiences Delivered Through Education Systems
M&E + Design: Innovation Through Collaboration
Just six months after COVID-19 closed schools, Educate! launched its first distance learning model in Uganda, and 3,400 young people enrolled. We’re now remotely reaching just as many Ugandan youth as we were in schools pre-pandemic, with over 40,000 enrolled. This rapid adaptation and scale are made possible by our ongoing investment in collaborative research and development (R&D).
Did you know that on average, less than 1% of yearly revenue in international development is spent on R&D, compared to the up to 20% spent at companies like Google and Intel? Educate! believes R&D is critical to ensuring we continue to scale the most effective solutions, and these investments have been crucial to our success. This innovation is a key element of what we believe it takes to build a disruptive non-profit social enterprise. Two teams drive R&D at Educate!: Design and Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E). They have developed a systematized partnership, and their collaboration allows us to build innovation directly into our solutions. M&E Manager Brian Okwir notes that this partnership enables us to closely monitor all models as they grow and change, which helps us to quickly discover and overcome any barriers to youth impact. (Continued on page 4)
Joan feels fortunate to have had strong female role models to look up to throughout her life. Raised in Kamuli, Uganda by a hardworking single mother, Joan was surrounded by a close-knit community of women, many of whom helped to pay her school fees. The stark contrast between Joan’s belief in herself and the harmful narratives she heard in secondary school motivated her to critically consider what girls are taught to think about their abilities and the opportunities available to them. Like many girls and young women around the world, Joan faced barriers to education but was fortunate to have a supportive network. She recognizes that for girls without such a community, the costs of education can be an impassable barrier and a missed opportunity for valuable mentorship.
Leveraging her Skills to Strengthen Educate!’s Impact Joan’s advocates and her steadfast belief in herself helped her to stay in school and to discover Educate!. She participated in Educate!’s in-school model, giving her the tools and the space to practice and apply the hard and soft skills she’d need beyond the classroom, like financial literacy, collaboration, and critical thinking.
Rwandan student delivers a product presentation
After graduating, Joan set out to further refine her leadership and entrepreneurship skills by joining the Educate! team building bootcamps for girls unable to attend secondary school in Uganda. Joan says that her personal experience of knowing what these girls have been through, allows her to “put [her]self in their shoes in order to serve them better.” Professionally, she says, “I was encouraged to start a business beyond the little I had: a sugarcane snack business. I was able to become more creative with managing the stipend from my work so that I can be able to finance my business to make it grow. I later started up a small canteen with snacks, and beyond that, I invested in two pigs.” These firsthand experiences enable her to help Educate! design and improve the models that equip girls with the skills they need to tap into new opportunities.
Creating Communities that Uplift Girls Today, Joan is a fierce advocate for young women who have dropped out of school and committed to a future where no women are forced to depend on their husband’s income. Women in this position are “being held back at almost every turn,” says Joan. “They are barely getting by and on someone else’s terms.” As a role model and leader in her community, Joan is breaking down these barriers. Outside of her position at Educate!, she contributes to a savings group and teaches financial literacy skills to other young women and girls. “What I am hoping to contribute to is building entrepreneurial skills through a village savings cooperative — to equip young ladies with skills to run businesses. I want these young ladies to learn about money management and build their self-esteem and the hard skills of starting something: marketing, creating partnerships, and investing even more.”
Through this work, Joan hopes to increase the agency girls have in their lives and create a strong and supportive network to uplift and empower them.
Distance learning participant Patrick helps a customer
(Continued from page 1)
Impact Multiplied
M&E + Design: Innovation Through Collaboration
(Continued from page 3)
Design and M&E continuously collaborate throughout the model development and pilot process:
1. Setup: Collaborating to Build & Pilot At the Setup stage of a brand new model, the Design and M&E Teams come together to consider how a new model might effectively build the critical youth skills proven to impact their lives in the long term. The Design Team first considers how to create an engaging and effective learner experience and then works to improve upon it. They begin by asking themselves questions about the design elements that drive youth participation and engagement.
For example: What keeps some youth from enrolling in the model? Is the curriculum being delivered and received as designed?
The M&E Team produces a plan to track the implementation of the model and its impact on youth. They focus on assessing the frequency of youth participation throughout the pilot’s learning activities as well as their effectiveness.
For example: What skills are participants developing in those experiences, and how are those skills impacting their lives?
To answer these initial questions and to be able to measure the pilot’s success when it ends, the teams jointly develop key performance indicators for each aspect of the model and find a way to gather that data.
For example, to better understand if a particular lesson within the curriculum is effective, the teams might ask youth if they’ve practiced a specific skill from that lesson within their small business or community project and how it might have impacted their work.
2. Integration: Building a Data-Driven Culture At the Integration stage, Design and M&E meet with additional teams to talk through a pilot’s design, goals, and how to assess its performance as the pilot launches and runs. This performance indicator data is regularly collected and displayed within online dashboards that all teams can access to see the model’s progress in real-time. Design and M&E’s role is to ensure others can understand the dashboard’s metrics and how they relate to each staff member’s role.
For example, Design and M&E train the Program Implementation Team to interpret and effectively use youth participation data to better manage and support the staff facilitating the learning experience for youth as the program runs. Samson Mbugua, Head of Performance Metrics, finds this step critical to Educate!’s alignment and culture:
“M&E and Design work to establish that causal relationship between activities and impact, documenting this in a roadmap based on our Theory of Change. Within the broader team, this roadmap is used to center the teams to work toward impact in a measurable manner, creating a data-driven culture.” — Samson Mbugua, Head of Performance Metrics
“Design and M&E are thought partners. Design comes up with thoughts on how the model might be developed and delivered, and this is transformed into design strategies. M&E develops tools and systems to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the model, and shares information which tells the teams whether the model is working or not based on how it was designed.” — Aloysie Niyoyita, Regional Performance Metrics Manager
3. Iteration: Strengthing Impact Through Evidence-Based Improvements
Finally, at the Iteration stage, Design and M&E work together to answer the questions that guided their decisions during the Setup. They each produce a report to highlight where the model met its objectives and where there is room for improvement.
If, for example, the Design Team decided to test a gamification strategy to increase youth engagement, they will work with M&E to see if the point system developed for one group of participants helped to motivate them to participate in more activities than their counterparts without this game element.
Finally, Design and M&E propose design changes, brainstorm how to effectively implement them, and consider how to measure their impact. Then, the cycle begins all over again. Thanks to this strong partnership and a steadfast investment in R&D, Monitoring & Evaluation Manager Brian Okwir shares that:
“Educate! is able to build more complex models and systems with confidence that they are working well, in a way that allows us to continuously learn and improve.” — Brian Okwir, Monitoring & Evaluation Manager