Educate! Leaders Share Pathways to Innovating for Impact at CIES
In April, three Educate! leaders joined researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from around the world at the 2021 Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) annual meeting, sharing their expertise on the theme of Social Responsibility Within Changing Contexts.
Drawing on their extensive experience, Educate!’s Design and Initiatives Lead Hellen Namisi, Monitoring and Evaluation Director Meghan Mahoney, and Uganda Country Director Hawah Nabbuye provided insight on three engaging panels which sought to answer 3 important questions.
Can leadership be taught? How do we know if we are successfully helping young people become leaders?
Presenting with the University of California Berkeley, STiR Education, and UNESCO, Design & Initiatives Lead Hellen Namisi discussed Educate!’s approach to cultivating and measuring youth leadership. Our core experience is designed to build youth’s cooperative leadership skills and develop leaders who inspire and mobilize others to accomplish a common goal. Hellen also discussed Educate!’s internal program monitoring system — a tool created to assess whether or not youth are receiving the experiences necessary to gain fundamental skills.
Key Takeaway: Contextualizing a leadership-focused curriculum to fit learners’ environments and allowing them to practically apply those skills is critical to skill development.
How can organizations adapt their pre-pandemic assessment strategies to design and iterate upon new remote models more quickly?
On a panel alongside Young1ove, R4D, and Bridge International Academies, Monitoring and Evaluation Director Meghan Mahoney shared Educate!’s internal Rapid Impact Assessment System developed in response to COVID-19-related school closures in Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya. Within this process, Educate! learned to define and measure short-term indicators of skill development to assess youth progress in developing critical skills within our distance learning models.
Key Takeaway: Our new rapid assessment system could have applications within other education models, and even sectors, as we all work to build and improve solutions more efficiently.
Can we build youth skills outside of the education system and measurably improve life outcomes?
Uganda Country Director Hawah Nabbuye presented on a panel featuring Uwezo Uganda, the Foundation for Inclusive Community Help, and the Luigi Giussani Institute of Higher Education about reaching youth outside of schools, sharing Educate!’s journey to create a distance learning bootcamp in Uganda. Our rigorously evaluated flagship model and accelerated versions of that core experience (2013’s SEED and 2019’s Boda-Boda Bootcamp) provided us with the evidence to more confidently design an all-remote, skill-based bootcamp in 2020. This virtual experience was delivered via basic technologies, and pre-/post-evaluations showed improvements in participants’ non-cognitive skills, such as determination and goal setting, as well as economic activity, like running businesses, earning income, and saving money.
Key Takeaway: A few key lessons for deepening impact and increasing equity include: including families in the learning experience, using storytelling to engage learners, tailoring program design to maximize accessible technology, and prioritizing gender equity.
