Co-Creating Youth Opportunities at Scale
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?
The progress here is promising. We learned recently that by reforming a single academic subject, we can significantly impact their life outcomes, including doubling their likelihood of enrolling in university and a 167% increase for girls alone.
We believe that secondary school offers the most cost-effective way for youth to learn and practice the skills that they will need to thrive in life after school. Over the last nine years, we’ve partnered with governments to integrate skills-based learning opportunities into national education systems — all in an effort to improve outcomes for young people at scale.
Partnering to Achieve System-wide Impact
Educate! has developed a first-of-its-kind, evidence-driven approach to education reform. Our systems-change strategy aims to ensure that changes in national education policy or curricula translate into meaningful changes for students in the classroom.
Reform Policy: First, we work alongside government partners to incorporate the skills-based learning activities that we believe drive impact, such as student business clubs and learner-centered pedagogy, into the national curriculum of a single subject.
Train Teachers: To encourage the uptake and adoption of this policy change, we then collaborate with the relevant education ministries to ensure educators receive the training and support they need to deliver the updated, skills-focused curriculum and its accompanying hands-on learning activities.
Embed Sustainability Tools & Structures: Lastly, we continue to work with government stakeholders to identify and integrate structures to help schools and teachers sustain the new curriculum and teaching style, like assessment reforms which aim to ensure student evaluations are also learner-centered and that teachers and staff can easily put them into practice.
After completing all three stages, Educate! will exit this education system support role. Government administrators and teachers will have the tools and experience to deliver this evidence-based learning experience.
Evaluating the Impact of Single-Subject Reform on Youth in Rwanda
In 2015, Educate! received an invitation from Rwanda’s Ministry of Education to leverage what we learned working with youth directly in Uganda to strengthen the impact of secondary school in Rwanda: an opportunity to pilot our 3-stage approach to education reform.
We worked together with the Rwandan government and partner organizations to (1) update Rwanda’s secondary-level entrepreneurship curriculum, (2) create teacher trainings to support their understanding and uptake of the reform, and (3) ensure teachers and administrators can easily continue delivering this updated curriculum and pedagogy to students.
To evaluate the impact of this systems-change approach on students, we partnered with Rwanda Education Board, Akazi Kanoze Access, and researchers from the World Bank, Oregon State University, and Innovations for Poverty Action to launch a randomized controlled trial (RCT).
Our big takeaway: By collaborating with government stakeholders to reform a single subject, we can significantly impact youth through the education system.
The results are an exciting confirmation of our 3-stage approach to improving the quality of secondary education. This single-subject reform in Rwanda offers a new pathway to improved student-level outcomes, like access to university and a 16% increase in business ownership for young women, and at a faster rate and lower cost than more comprehensive reforms like universal access, especially as investments in secondary school continue to lag behind primary.