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 can generate faster estimates of impact to inform model design and delivery.
We also conduct ongoing performance metric monitoring to manage and ensure the quality of model delivery and implementation.
Educate! has built a Rapid Impact Assessment System (RIA) to generate faster, continuous data on our models. The system enables teams to run continuous, or ‘rapid,’ learning cycles that link changes in model design and delivery to impacts on youth — making critical connections between model design, delivery, and short- and medium-term outcomes.
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 randomized 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 evaluations. By aligning evaluation methodologies with model maturity and learning goals, we prioritize a “fit-for-research purpose” approach, ensuring our research answers important questions that can maximize impact.
