Schools in Uganda opened their doors in January to welcome back students after a staggering 83-week closure — the longest closure of schools anywhere in the world — caused by the spread of COVID-19 in March 2020. But while many young people will eagerly pack their book bags and return to the classroom, officials in Uganda estimate that up to a third of students may never return. This is a disheartening projection for the large number of young people who are already struggling to secure quality employment and build their livelihoods.

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), driven by our Design and Monitoring & Evaluation Teams.

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. 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?

Despite learning from experience that women are capable of anything, when Joan entered secondary school, she started to feel like she didn't belong. 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.

Educate! is impact-obsessed. For over ten years, we’ve invested heavily in measuring our solutions through rigorous impact evaluations, including external randomized controlled trials. While these longterm studies are critical to measuring our impact on youth life outcomes over time, we’ve also learned that collecting smaller datasets, faster, can ensure we’re able to improve upon our models in real time.

Secondary school offers the most natural and cost-effective way for youth to learn and practice the transferable, socioemotional, and entrepreneurial skills that they will need to thrive in the future, whether they seek employment or create their own businesses. Read how Educate! works with governments to improve youth skills to ensure them better life outcomes.

Head of External Relations Rachael Miller Buck sits down with Acting Head of Tech and Head of Performance Metrics Samson Mbugua to chat about his role, what this past year has taught him, and what he's looking forward to.

Three Educate! leaders joined researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from around the world at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) annual meeting, sharing their expertise on the theme of Social Responsibility Within Changing Contexts.

IPA, one of Educate!’s highly-valued research partners, created a video highlighting the importance of investing in research and development in international development work. Read the full blog for some quick highlights!

Head of External Relations Rachael Miller Buck sat down with Policy & Partnerships Strategist Donnalee Donaldson to chat about her role, COVID's impacts, and what she's looking forward to.

Promoting gender equity is core to Educate!’s mission. For over ten years, we’ve implemented an evidence-based gender equity and inclusivity strategy within our in-school model, with real and measurable results. Our current challenge is learning about how our distance learning model supports and uplifts girls, and where we can improve its gender equity outcomes.

Our commitment to designing solutions with equity front of mind is as critical now as it has ever been, and we can always strive to do more and do better. Even youth with ample support and access to resources are experiencing a loss of learning due to this crisis, and those without it will face even greater challenges in their recovery. As we continue to iterate, experiment, and build on Educate!’s equity-focused approaches, it is our hope that our solutions will provide youth, both in and out of school, with the skills they need to overcome the inequities they face during and after the pandemic.

One of the most important lessons for social impact organizations and entrepreneurs is that good intentions alone do not create impact. That’s why we’ve worked hard to build an impact-obsessed culture that aims to create meaningful, measurable impact on life outcomes for youth. Our rigorous evaluations help us better understand Educate!’s impact as well as how to strengthen it, and this knowledge led the development of our models as we adapted to COVID-19.

During school closures, Muwonge regularly tunes in to listen to Educate!’s radio lessons on his local station. Muwonge set out to create his own classroom at home, seeking out individualized support and hands-on experiential learning through Educate!’s VIP Bootcamp. Leveraging his skills and the knowledge gained from the Bootcamp, Muwonge has successfully started his first small business: selling charcoal briquettes in his community.

In 2019, Educate! launched a social enterprise entity called NawiriPro (“thrive professionally” in Kiswahili) to build our first model for out-of-school youth. We recently caught up with a few members of NawiriPro's first cohort, and we are excited to introduce you to Wilberforce, a budding young entrepreneur from the Kakamega Province in Kenya. We sat down with Wilberforce to learn more about his story, his business, and his experience in Educate!’s newest solution.

As we work to reinvent and redefine traditional secondary education, we are committed to continuous learning and sharing the lessons we learn with others in our space. Our goal is to further best practices within the youth skills conversation and use our insights and research to build a robust body of evidence that other implementers can leverage to serve youth. We believe that education should be tied directly to improved life outcomes for youth, and our Research and Development (R&D) efforts ensure we continue gathering the evidence that allows us to strengthen this link by iterating upon what works. Our obsession with impact and with making evidence- based decisions led us to create an “Experience Bar.”