Empowered, ambitious, and brave, Educate! graduate Abigail Chepkwurui is making waves for gender equity and driving change in her community. “I have to become a Member of Parliament.” For Abigail Chepkwurui, a twenty-year-old Educate! Graduate from Eastern Uganda, this is a goal she’s been actively working toward since before joining Educate!. “I’ll campaign for 2026.”

In Yumbe District, Northern Uganda, Educate! is partnering with secondary schools within three refugee settlements. Educate!'s program is particularly useful to these youth who are eager to learn the skills they’ll need to succeed in their new home. However, schools in these settlements face challenges that are unique to their circumstance. To ensure our program provides the maximum benefit to youth there, our staff must identify contextual challenges that might affect the program or students and modify the program accordingly.

This June students from across Rwanda came to Kigali to compete at Educate!’s first ever National Student Business Club Competition! Students from 11 schools showcased their innovative, eco-friendly, and impactful business products — all designed while still in secondary school.

Educate!’s team leader in Northern Uganda, Lawrence Komakech, recently joined a global online learning event called “Breakthroughs in Education: Innovations in Equity, Access, and Quality” to discuss Educate!’s experience innovating our model for the constraints of a post-conflict region.

Educate! has launched operations in the south of Uganda, and Dorothy Namubiru is the woman leading the expansion in the field. We sat down with Dorothy to celebrate her most recent promotion and to learn about how her work can create a grassroots movement of young leaders and entrepreneurs to drive sustainable development in the south of Uganda.

A new study from Mathematica Policy Research examined Educate!’s innovative approaches for enhancing teacher quality at scale. The study, which looked at organizations supported by the multi-donor Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education (PSIPSE), distilled learnings from the experiences of eight organizations implementing in-service teacher training programs. The findings offer practical lessons about how to design, implement, and scale efforts to train, motivate, and support teachers.

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.