Quasi-Experimental Evaluation Shows Educate! Maintains Impact at Scale

One of our biggest questions of 2017 was: Have we maintained our impact as we’ve scaled the Educate! Experience across Uganda? Thanks to a new external evaluation, the results are in. We are achieving similar impact for graduates of our program, even as we’ve dramatically increased the number of youth we reach.

Educate! has grown nearly 10x in size since our randomized controlled trial (RCT) in 2013, so this year Educate! completed a quasi-experimental evaluation to understand our impact at scale. The evaluation, conducted in partnership with BRAC, examined 1,617 students in 52 secondary schools from rural and urban areas in Central and Eastern Uganda. It compared students who graduated from the Educate! Experience in 2016 with those who had not participated, yet are similar to Educate! students across a number of characteristics. All students were at the end of secondary school during the time of survey. 

Similar to the results of the RCT, the new evaluation showed that Educate! graduates earned nearly TWICE as much as their peers, and were more likely to own a business. This evaluation also found that our program led to a 50% increase in employment. Additionally, the evaluation demonstrated that our model still helps to close the gender gap, with a larger relative impact on girls as compared to boys.

These results show that Educate! continues to achieve what we set out to do: improve students’ life outcomes and build the supply of high achieving youth who are needed in the labor market to drive development in Africa.