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