Educate! Local
Partnering with local organizations to bring Educate!’s proven skills-based education to youth in and out of school in East Africa
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been working to design and deliver solutions which continue to build the youth skills that help them to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs, and ultimately, drive development in their communities. Our approach when developing new programming has always been the same: to learn from those already creating impressive impact in the field and to pay it forward by sharing our new products and learnings as we continue iterating upon them.
Our open source curriculum has been downloaded more than 1,000 times, and over 200 organizations have tailored the content to meet the needs of their local contexts across more than 50 countries.
Launch: Educate! Local
Our latest innovation, Educate! Local, aims to support youth organizations in their efforts to increase youth engagement in education and support their resilience and recovery during and after the coronavirus outbreak.
We’ve found impact contextualizing and scaling the core components of our proven skills-based education model and have now found success in redesigning them to fit distance learning environments using proven, low-tech vehicles.
By partnering with local organizations, together, we can deliver quality skills-based education programming amidst varied levels of community and school operation or closures.
Educate! Local is delivered in collaboration with youth-focused organizations in Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya, and comprised of the following core components:
1. Build: Learners are presented with new, practical concepts
Educate! develops and airs engaging and informative course content via radio programming to partner communities.
2. Practice: Mentors guide learners in hands-on, real-world activities
Our partners deliver what we believe to be the linchpin of our skills-based education model – the practical experience, thereby adapting the course to fit local needs and interests as well as health and safety guidance.
3 Present: Learners demonstrate their knowledge and the program adapts
Educate! measures student progress towards desired learning outcomes via SMS-based assessments, adapting programming and informing community-based partners of student progress.
Educate! Local: A Partnership Approach
As we look into the longer term, we must prepare for a new normal in which youth may or may not be able to safely return to school. We must work together to design new ways of reaching youth to prepare them with the skills needed to succeed in the 21st century.
Our partnerships ensure that two critical needs are met:
Health & Safety:
The physical and emotional well-being of youth, their families, and any service provider is our highest priority. Trusted community-based and focused organizations are better in tune with the ever-evolving health guidance that will help to keep citizens safe.
Adaptation:
Those working within the community know its needs best, including its young people. Mentors are naturally best equipped to contextualize new concepts to fit the local environment and culture and to individualize learning to ensure advanced learners are challenged and those struggling have proper support.