Designing Learning with Empathy Equips Young Mothers Like Hanifah for Success
At 14, Hanifah’s education came to a halt due to financial challenges. Two years later, she left home to work as a waitress and married soon after. By 26, she was a mother of four, devoted to raising her children but unsure of her own potential.
Although Hanifah had land where she would grow crops to feed her children, she wasn’t generating any income. “I used to give away everything,” she says. “I never imagined I could sell and earn from my harvests.”
In 2023, a friend introduced Hanifah’s husband to Educate!’s livelihood bootcamp in Uganda. With her in-laws helping care for her two-month-old baby, Hanifah took a leap of faith and decided to join. She didn’t know what to expect, but was determined to try.
Reality Behind the Statistics
Hanifah’s story is an example of how alternative pathways like livelihood bootcamps can unlock the potential of young mothers.
Across parts of Africa, nearly 50% of secondary-age youth are not in school, an economic reality that hits young women the hardest. In some rural areas, only 1 in 20 girls are on track to finish secondary education.
Many, like Hanifah, carry the double weight of early motherhood and the urgent need to provide for their families.
Designing with Empathy for Young Mothers: Meet Juliet
To reflect the common experiences of youth who are out of school, Educate! developed a composite persona named Juliet. Built through deep research, including interviews and fieldwork, Juliet personifies the struggles that keep young people, especially young women, on the economic sidelines.
Juliet is a young mother living just seven kilometers from a bustling urban center. She left school at 14 due to financial hardship and now makes a small living doing occasional digging work, earning only $1 a day. Without a phone of her own, any formal training, or a stable income, Juliet has struggled to launch a small business.
Educate!’s Program Manager for Out-of-School Youth, Dorothy Namubiru, played a key role in developing the Juliet persona.
Juliet - Educate!’s composite persona.
“Juliet is not a fictional character. She’s a mirror of the young people that we design the livelihood bootcamps for, and we’re thinking about her all the way through the user journey. This helps us ground the experience in empathy, ensuring we can retain Juliet throughout the experience and that she graduates with improved economic prospects afterwards. Her story helps us see beyond the data and understand the day-to-day realities that shape a young mother’s choices.”
– Dorothy Namubiru, Program Manager for Out-of-School Youth
Bootcamps Meet Youth Where They Are
Educate!’s livelihood bootcamps offer practical, hands-on experience starting a business. Participants don’t just sit in a classroom; they practice pitching, budgeting, and prototyping ideas. They form groups, get feedback, and adapt – just like in the real world.
Every bootcamp is grounded in the economic and cultural context of its location. We design for relevance, encouraging business ideas that reflect the local market. Each participant is paired with a community mentor, usually a small business owner, who can motivate young people.
Recognizing that consistency is key, we’ve implemented incentives that help participants – especially young women – stay engaged. These include transport reimbursement, sanitary towels, and recruiting skilled facilitators and service providers that comply with safeguarding policies. This creates a safe, supportive environment where participants can confidently complete the bootcamp and apply what they’ve learned.
Most importantly, we focus on transferable skills and cultivating a growth mindset. By considering the schedules, responsibilities, and unique challenges faced by young mothers like Juliet, we offer dignity and foster agency.
Together, these efforts have shown encouraging early impact through internal evaluation.
Looking ahead, we have a lot to learn and are continuing to measure outcomes for youth, while increasing the rigor of evaluation.
Scaling Access Across Regions
Aiming to expand impact to even greater numbers of young people, Educate! is building a model that can scale. As we expand across Kenya and Uganda, we learn more about the diverse realities of youth and apply insights to new cohorts.
Continuous learning helps refine the Juliet persona, ensuring our recruitment methods and learning experiences align with the evolving needs of youth - especially young women navigating early motherhood, limited education, and financial instability.
Hanifah’s Next Chapter
For Hanifah, newfound skills in business planning and market research have been transformative.
After planting and selling her tomatoes, she reinvested her earnings (nearly $155) along with a top-up from her husband to purchase a 25 ft-by-50 ft plot of land. She’s now expanded into yams and sugarcane and earned $268 from sugarcane alone, enough to pay school fees.
Looking ahead, Hanifah dreams of purchasing an additional acre of land to plant 10,000 tomatoes, and has already drafted a plan for a second business - a car wash.
She says: “Youth in Africa are courageous and hard-working. Low-income earners can move forward, step by step. We just need knowledge so that we can prosper in whatever we are doing.”
Hanifah (right) and her sisters harvest yams.