Monitoring & Evaluation Approach
Educate!’s teams leverage iterative learning and continuous evaluation to build scalable, cost-effective, and sustainable solutions that can improve economic and life outcomes for young people across Africa.
Our research methodology relies on periodic rigorous external evaluations, such as randomized control trials (RCTs), to measure medium- and long-term outcomes, coupled with rapid evaluation methodologies that generate fast estimates of impact to inform learning and help us continuously improve. As a model advances in maturity — from ideation to scale — we increase the level of evaluation rigor, ensuring research gives us the insights we need to drive impact for youth.
We also conduct ongoing performance monitoring on key metrics to manage the quality of model delivery and implementation, ensuring our approach continues to deliver the greatest impact.
Educate! has built a Rapid Impact Assessment System (RIA) to generate fast, continuous estimates of impact on our models. The system enables teams to run ‘rapid’ learning cycles that link changes in model design and delivery to real-time impacts on youth — making critical connections between model design, delivery, and short- and medium-term outcomes for youth.
Where an RCT can often take years to return results, the RIA system can provide rapid insights on how an intervention is shifting outcomes in just a few months, answering the critical question, “Is this working the way we intend?” The RIA system has become a platform to support A/B and hypothesis testing, as well as controlled evaluations.
By testing a model early in development, learning from the results, and adapting, we can make important decisions that maximize impact for young people. As a model moves toward scale, we increase the rigor of the research and evaluation.
