Educate!

Educate! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. Our goal is to design skills-based education and employment solutions which impact youth life outcomes sustainably and at scale.

When COVID-19 prompted school closures, we quickly mobilized to develop an adapted distance learning model to continue serving youth in Uganda. This model has the same core components as our flagship model— 1) skills lessons, 2) practical experience and mentorship, and 3) assessments, offering individualized support and mentorship delivered to youth through basic technologies like SMS (text) and phone calls (no smartphone or internet required). By October 2020, our distance learning model had reached over 100,000 students by October 2020.

Support towards Educate!’s programs at this pivotal time would enable the organization to invest in the following priority areas:

1. Impact in-school youth with blended/distance learning through VIP Bootcamp in Uganda (School Solutions).

2. Run experiments and conduct R&D focused on how distance learning and technology tools and strategies can be used to support our education reform work in Rwanda and Kenya (Education System Solutions).

3. Learn how to use bootcamps to deliver our core impact to out-of-school youth in Uganda and Kenya (Out-of-School Youth Solutions).

My name is Boris Bulayev, the Co-Founder and CEO of Educate!. At the age of seven, my family emigrated to the U.S. from Latvia and I consider myself fortunate to have attended public schools in San Francisco that led to Amherst College. As a refugee myself, I believe in the power of giving youth access to the same quality education that allowed me to get to where I am today. 

My desire is to see secondary education systems preparing youth with the skills they need to find employment or maximize their work and make a productive living. Unfortunately, education systems in Africa are largely failing to prepare youth with practical, transversal skills, setting them up for failure once they leave school. 

Educate!’s purpose is to help youth develop transferable skills, including grit, resilience, teamwork, communication, social responsibility, business planning, project management, book-keeping, market research, and more. Educate! shifts from rote memorization to experiential learning and from a theoretical to a more practical educational approach, providing youth with relevant skills to succeed in business. 

My long term vision is for Educate! to continue designing and delivering evidence-based, sustainable, and cost-effective solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year. 

Africa will be 40% of the world by 2100—its population is expected to grow from 1.2 to 4 billion. As many as 90% of African youth are projected to work in the informal sector. These demographics, along with a scarcity of jobs, have led to dramatic rates of youth unemployment. Education systems in Africa already face challenges meeting young people’s needs–current curricula and teaching methods don’t consistently prepare students for what’s to come following graduation. Despite an eagerness and commitment to learn, even students who finish secondary school often find themselves lacking the skills needed to attain further education, overcome gender inequities and secure one of few available jobs, leading to unemployment and underemployment. Now, the pandemic has even further hindered access and quality of education for African youth and is presenting new challenges for youth’s livelihoods.

Educate! addresses Africa's most pressing problems – the mismatch between secondary education and employment opportunities by partnering with youth, schools, and governments to design and deliver solutions that equip young people in Africa with the skills to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs, and drive development in their communities.

Educate!’s most notable and unique attribute is our ability to scale while keeping costs low. Our model has been proven to be impactful, cost-effective (we leverage the existing infrastructure of national education systems and realize economies of scale), and sustainable (we design and implement actionable plans with governments to progress toward system-level adoption of our solution).

Since, leading the organization starting in 2004, Educate! has also proven  the ability to pivot and innovate quickly. Following the pandemic, Educate! created and deployed our first  distance learning model, based on our proven in-school model, with the goal of facilitating quality learning experiences for youth despite school closures. 

Educate! plans to integrate the solutions and learnings from this distance learning model into a blended learning model, driving greater scale and cost-effectiveness. This means Educate! now has the opportunity to reach vulnerable populations of youth who we previously didn’t have access to, including those  left behind by the formal education system. This distance learning work also sets Educate! up for a (near) future when more youth have smartphones and access to light internet, giving us the potential to  expand and serve new contexts and populations.

Educate! exists to create a model of education that’s tied to and directly accountable for life outcomes, including: increased soft/transferable skills and educational attainment; improved gender-related outcomes; increased business ownership and employment; and improved livelihoods. The impact measurement philosophy relies on periodic, rigorous external evaluations to measure medium- and long-term outcomes, coupled with ongoing monitoring to continuously manage program quality and track immediate impact for students. 

All programs are modelled on Educate!’s proven theory of change in Uganda, a flagship model that has been extensively and externally evaluated, including through two gold-standard randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and a quasi-experimental evaluation. 

An RCT in 2014 and a quasi-experimental evaluation in 2016, found that towards the end of secondary school, participants earned nearly double the income of their peers. In mid-2019, the evaluation looked at the same student cohort 4 years after they graduated from the Educate! Program and found strong impacts on: 1) soft skills—improved grit, creativity, and self-efficacy; 2) gender-related outcomes—less domestic violence, fewer sexual partners, fewer children, and more egalitarian views; and 3) educational attainment—increased secondary school completion, increased tertiary enrollment for women, and greater likelihood of selecting higher-earning majors (business and STEM areas of study).