Breaking Down Barriers: How skills-based education can help girls thrive in life after school

Over the last ten years, we’ve been moved by the extraordinary ways our female students have broken down gender barriers and taken action to enact positive change. From young entrepreneurs and innovators to scientists, educators, and activists, Educate! graduates have gone on to be changemakers in their communities.

While we know the youth we work with leverage their skills to shine in many capacities after school, we were surprised to receive exciting new evidence in 2019, which suggests that Educate! is more effective at tackling gender inequity within girls’ lives and promoting positive gender-related outcomes than we had expected. Here, we unpack our theories as to what prompted these results and explore why it matters, with implications for others working in the youth skills ecosystem as well as anyone looking to support girls in achieving their full potential and capturing their goals.

Educate!’s Gender Equity Outcomes

Through a randomized control trial (RCT) measuring the impact of our model on young women four years after graduating, we found a number of significant “social spillovers”— impacts which span multiple areas of a young person’s life. We learned that Educate! led to notable improvements in young women’s educational attainment as well as gender equity-related outcomes: virtually closing the gender gap in secondary graduation rates and increasing females’ likelihood of attending university and pursuing higher-earning degrees. Coupled with these outcomes, the RCT showed a reduction in intimate partner violence (18% decrease for women), delayed childbirth (21% decrease for women and men), fewer children, and increased joint decision-making in a relationship. Our model encourages young men to be equal partners in challenging inequality and dismantling barriers that hold girls back, and the RCT found that this positively shifted boys’ perspectives regarding their female peers — gender attitudes were more egalitarian. After participating in Educate!, young men further recognized women’s value and roles in society as well as a woman’s right to safe and consensual sex.

The reason these results are particularly powerful has a lot to do with the context in which they take place. While strides have been made towards gender equity in Uganda, many social and economic barriers exist for women and girls. Girls continue to have far less access to education, and women face a significant wage gap compared to men in the labor market. Women and girls also experience high rates of IPV: 56% report having experienced physical and/or sexual violence. The prevalence of gender-based violence carries high social and economic costs not only for women but for entire communities. Violence can trap families within intergenerational poverty and it is often the poorest women who are the most exposed to violence—perpetuating a pervasive cycle.

Women and girls are a powerful force for change in this context. Their decisions around partner selection, family planning, educational attainment, and labor market participation can shape the trajectory of their lives as well as their family’s for generations. We were thrilled to learn about the impact of our model in these areas, and with stakes this high, we know it’s important to understand what prompted our results.

What Drives Educate!’s Impact on Girls?

This evaluation of our model, four years after participation, suggests that Educate! empowers girls in the long term, enabling them to exercise agency throughout their lives. We believe the core driver of these outcomes is Educate!’s innovative curriculum coupled with the structure of our solution in Uganda. We engage an equal number of girls and boys together in the classroom because we know it’s critical that boys understand these concepts too and are partners in challenging gender injustice. We’ve developed a student-centered model that places girls at equal footing, while teachers and youth mentors trained in gender equity facilitate a safe and equitable space for experiential learning.

Our curriculum was developed with gender responsiveness at the forefront, and our model blends a combination of soft skills, such as improved grit, creativity, and self-efficacy, alongside practical application. For example, our lessons include real-life case studies that encourage youth to think critically about gender. We also recognize the power of representation. In an environment where few women occupy entrepreneurship and teaching spaces, we intentionally recruit female Mentors for our students, who act as role models for both male and female students to look up to. Mentors are trained to prompt girls to speak in front of the class, encourage girls to hold leadership positions at school, and combat the socialization of girls to be quiet and demure. Together, these components create the social spillover impacts that our RCT evaluation found.

Redefining Education to Empower Girls Globally

We know, and countless examples globally have shown, that when you invest in girls and empower them to engage actively in decision making, everyone benefits. Women raise their own living standards as well as the standards of those around them. A woman with a secondary or tertiary education can expect to earn two to three times as much as a woman with no education—and these are earnings she will invest back into her family. When girls are educated and empowered, families get healthier, economies grow, and cycles of poverty are broken. By all accounts, life gets better.

We believe the social spillovers shown in this study provide valuable insights into how to facilitate equitable and impactful learning, as the results from our evaluation show a meaningful impact on girls’ life outcomes — all without explicitly targeting these outcomes. These results suggest that by redefining the education young people receive, we can empower youth not only with the skills to navigate life after school but to become effective allies in breaking down barriers that hold girls back.