Why mentors are the key to career success

After launching Satiety Bakery, a cake business he started while a student and Educate! Scholar in his remote village in Uganda, Ernest nearly gave up. “I thought it was too much work,” he said. “But Educate! picked me up.”

Ernest credits his Educate! Mentor with giving him the motivation to persist in his business. “I started putting in more effort. I started packaging my products and I would go with a sample and tell businesses they can earn money by selling my products. Mentor Carole has watched over me like a saint and my business has grown and grown.”

Ernest’s experience, and the power of the Educate! model, were validated in a recent Gallup study. The research explored the linkages between education and long-term success in the workplace and found:

Successful students had one or more teachers who were mentors and took a real interest in their aspirations, and they had an internship related to what they were learning in school. 

Gallup found that students needed not just to learn skills; they needed someone to mentor them while they learned them and to put those skills into practice. This type of education is exactly what Educate! works to integrate into secondary education systems in Africa.

The growing frustration of unemployed youth in Uganda, and elsewhere in Africa, underscores the urgent need for proven solutions, like Educate!, to the high youth unemployment rates all over Sub-Saharan Africa. With 94% of Educate! graduates running a business, holding a job, or attending university we’re thrilled to bring our model to more youth through our plans to scale massively and reach 1 million youth annually across Africa in 10 years.