Asante Africa Foundation

There is a common saying that “talent is equally distributed; opportunity is not.” At Asante Africa Foundation (“AAF”), we are committed to bringing opportunity to talented youth in East Africa that would otherwise be excluded from existing solutions simply because they are too difficult or expensive to reach. We know we can do better, and we work directly with partner schools and community leaders to deliver 21st-century skills to youth that empower them to get jobs, develop enterprises, and build thriving futures.  

The Elevate Prize presents a significant opportunity for thousands of rural youth to actualize their potential. We have developed one of the most cost-effective solutions in rural youth programming among well-known NGOs doing similar work, costing approximately $78 per youth per year. If selected as a winner, the prize will provide over 3,800 youth with the opportunity to become leaders and entrepreneurs who will create gender equitable communities without having to migrate to cities to find opportunities. Using our innovative Learn-Do-Teach methodology, each youth in our programs provides opportunities to another five people in their communities. That’s over 19,000 people whose lives will be measurably transformed by this solution.

I co-founded AAF with two East African women, with the vision of educating East Africa’s youth to confidently address their challenges, thrive in the global economy, and catalyze positive change.

While visiting East Africa in 2005, I witnessed complex educational challenges and recognized the need for systemic solutions, similar to how I identified and tackled challenges in my 20 years of work as an electronics-systems engineer and executive in Silicon Valley. Working in harsh rural contexts requires multi-faceted solutions sustained by communities long after NGOs transition. I recognized the disproportionate opportunity for boys over girls and the urgency to engage girls so that they were not left behind.

AAF began with two scholars and has now impacted over 650,000 youth, their families, and networks. By 2025, our global staff of over 50 talented innovators and changemakers will work to grow our impact to at least 1.6 million lives, with youth at decision tables influencing global climate change, East Africa’s digital economy, and gender equity.

AAF has been recognized as the winner of the USAID Young Women Transform Prize for girl-led innovation and the Reimagine Education Africa regional medal, in addition to being finalists in the Drucker Prize for global innovation. 

Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest rural population globally, with 39 million people living in areas often beyond the paved road. Fewer than 40% of rural Africans live within 2 kilometers of an all-season road—by far the lowest level of rural accessibility in the emerging world. 

Beyond the paved road live youth with dreams and enormous potential but inadequate support to ensure their success in school. They face difficulty escaping the perpetuation of gender inequities and have little access to economic opportunity. In Tanzania, only 28% of rural youth stay in school past primary school. In Kenya, 7.3% of youth are unemployed. In Uganda, 3 in10 girls are mothers and 33% marry before age 18.

We are solving these challenges through educational, entrepreneurship, and life skills programming led by girls and which is premised upon the hypothesis that to create sustainable change for rural communities, youth must lead change from the ground up. In our programs, youth customize and contextualize programs most suited to their specific challenges. Using a master trainer model, older girls peer-mentor and teach programs to younger youth. This transformative solution has the potential to change the outcome for over 100 million youth in East Africa.

Our unique approach is built upon Learn-Do-Teach methodology, a pedagogy practiced in the medical field (called SODOTO). Research shows that passive learners retain 30% of information, 75% through experience, and 90% by teaching others. We believe that this methodology is the most effective way to empower girls and boy advocates in extremely rural contexts to create disruptive, sustainable change for their communities without necessitating urbanization.

How it works:

In the learning stage, youth select from AAF’s skills training library (40 modules) to develop a program curriculum tailored to their challenges within unique contexts. Over a year, they learn through weekly sessions in safe space clubs, taught by older youth with oversight from a trained mentor. 

In parallel to weekly learning, youth apply training by developing business plans, raising seed capital, and starting businesses. AAF provides support through facilitating local business mentorship, mobile money transfer, and registration. 

Teaching to learn is our special sauce and the most critical to creating lasting impact. Each youth has a detailed action plan to pay it forward by teaching the program to 5 peers and family members. This is the final element that solidifies confidence and training, keeping youth at the forefront of sustainable change. 

Our programs create a partnership between educated young women and enlightened young men in a crucial step to transforming gender norms in rural Africa. This collaboration between the genders is the key to unlocking the talent and ambition of women in their society by creating a mutually beneficial system to transform communities.

The transformative impacts of our model included improved academic performance, advancement in the classroom, increased job readiness and employment rates after graduation, the initiation of small business startups, and income generation from participants. A recent USAID-funded evaluation of our program shows direct evidence of lives changing. 93% of our youth transition to secondary school, 77% qualified for university, 42% created team-based enterprises, and 42% experienced an increase in gainful employment over the control group.

AAF’s youth engagement ensures adaptability of the model through a human-centered design strategy, which engages beneficiaries in the contextualization and selection of curriculum for the intervention prior to implementation. The contextualization process encourages end-user adoption and sustainability by incorporating end-user challenges and priorities into the curriculum design. While we currently target the most marginalized rural communities, other NGOs have replicated the model in urban communities.