Our small but mighty Design and Innovations (D&I) team has their hands on every piece of Educate!’s work. They spend their days designing our curriculum for students; orchestrating trainings for Mentors, staff, teachers, and government officials; and running experiments, developing pilot programs, and conducting field research to test new ideas and assumptions. It’s demanding work, but these are the people who lay the foundation for Educate!’s success and who make future growth and improvement possible.

Educate!’s Evaluation Director Meghan Mahoney presented on a panel at the Comparative and International Education Society’s annual 2018 conference. The presentation highlighted Educate!’s collaboration to develop a new, soft skill measurement tool for youth in secondary school and outlined our experience attempting to measure soft skills.

The Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education (PSIPSE) recently released a brief offering 10 Tips for Improving Teacher Quality at Scale. PSIPSE drew on important insights from Educate! as well as seven other non-governmental organizations working to sharpen teachers’ pedagogical skills.

Educate! is proud to announce a catalytic new partnership with the IKEA Foundation to support our work in Kenya.

The top Student Business Clubs from across Uganda competed last month in the National Business Club Competitions. This year’s competition was an especially exciting weekend full of collaboration, friendly competition, and creative energy. 

In a rural community in Eastern Uganda, twins Shadia and Shakira somehow find the time to run their own businesses, serve as the Secretary and Treasurer of their Student Business Club, and excel in their courses at Nakalama Secondary School.

It’s no secret: Girls around the world face unique and greater barriers to success after school as entrepreneurs, in the workforce, and as leaders in their communities.

Last International Women’s Day, we shared the ways we’ve been working to build an expertise in gender, describing how we embarked on a research opportunity to maintain and build up gender justice as a priority across our organization as we scale. Over the past year, we focused on taking what we learned one step further, implementing a comprehensive gender justice strategy across our all of our key stakeholders: students, teachers, government officials, and staff members.

Entrepreneurship students have been preparing for this moment all year—products perfected and pitches practiced—with the hopes of advancing on to the National Student Business Club Competition next year.

While significant progress has been made for girls’ education around the world, our partner and friend Dana Schmidt of Echidna Giving notes in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that efforts to unlock the full promise of young women through quality education continue to fall short. It’s not enough to focus on educating girls, we need to improve how we focus on them. In order to do so, we must critically examine conventional wisdom about education for girls and abandon common approaches that have failed to produce real progress.

Currently, 90% of African youth are projected to work in the informal sector. While previously many advocated to transition youth from informal contexts to formal jobs, Making Cents International’s recent Global Youth Economic Opportunities (GYEO) Summit revealed a shift in thinking that closely aligns with our belief in creating a grassroots movement of young leaders and entrepreneurs to drive sustainable development.

Standing in front of his new shop, Francis is glowing. He has just achieved two of his life goals in quick succession. He was accepted to Kyambogo University to study social sciences—a dream he’s had since childhood. Then, as a top Educate! graduate, Francis was recruited to become a Mentor, a role that lets him support 120 other youth to achieve their own dreams.