Educate!

Boris Bulayev is the CEO & Co-Founder of Educate!, which provides youth in Africa with the skills they need to succeed in today's economy. As an immigrant and refugee from Latvia, Boris believes in the power of giving youth access to formative educational opportunities, which directly resonates with his own experience. Under his leadership, Educate! has grown to annually reach over 46,000 students intensively and about 500,000 more broadly across Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya, and has advised on the integration of skills-based education into Uganda and Rwanda’s national education systems.

Before jumping into Educate! full-time, Boris worked at startup incubator, Loeb Enterprises, learning about entrepreneurship and how to start companies. Boris is a recipient of the 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Award and 2011 Grinnell College Young Innovator for Social Justice Prize, and a two-time Forbes Top 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur.

Nearly 50% of Africans are under 18, and that number is growing. This, along with a scarcity of jobs, has led to dramatic rates of unemployment. Education systems in Africa emphasize curricula and teaching methods that are outdated, consisting of rote memorization and exam-driven learning which do not prepare students to succeed in today’s economy. The current status quo perpetuates lack of opportunity and cycles of poverty—allowing the enormous potential of youth to remain untapped. 

Educate! tackles youth unemployment by partnering with youth, schools, and governments to redefine education so that youth in Africa have the skills to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs, and drive development in their communities. Educate! is elevating humanity by equipping youth with essential 21st century and transferable skills, empowering them to become the drivers of development in their communities and countries. 

Seven billion youth are projected to enroll in secondary school in Africa by the end of this century. Yet, education systems in Africa face challenges meeting young peoples’ needs – current curricula and teaching methods don’t consistently prepare students for life after graduation. Despite an eagerness and commitment to learn, students spend years stuck in classrooms memorizing facts they won’t use, missing out on learning the skills they need, and graduating into job markets that they are unprepared for and cannot thrive in. This leads to high unemployment rates, lack of opportunity, and cycles of poverty.

For young women, the sting of unemployment is felt more sharply, as they tend to be more disadvantaged than young men in access to work, driving them to the informal economy. For youth that are fortunate enough to secure jobs, private sector firms report dissatisfaction with the skills acquired through education.

In a world where 50% of children are expected to be African by the turn of the century, reforming secondary education is a catalytic, high-leverage solution to youth unemployment and consequent development issues. Educate! believes that by transforming secondary education, we can equip youth with the skills to disrupt this systemic problem.

Educate! is designing and delivering evidence-based, sustainable and cost-effective solutions in an effort to measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year. Educate! Accomplishes this through three core ways: 

1. School Solutions: we deliver leadership, workforce readiness and entrepreneurship training directly in secondary schools, in order to rigorously test and refine our model under the conditions the education system faces and to create an evidence base for its effectiveness.

2. Education System Solutions: we partner with governments to integrate our solution into national education systems, so that the system moves from teaching students to memorize facts to equipping students with the skills to succeed in the 21st century.

3. Out-of-School Youth: we are building a new educational solution to impact out-of-school youth to gain the skills to succeed in today’s economy. 

Through these solution lines, Educate! continues to prepare more youth than ever before with the skills for life after school by teaching transferable and soft skills demanded most by both employers and students themselves.

Primary beneficiaries of Educate!’s model are secondary school youth in Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya. This includes orphans and vulnerable children, youth living with HIV/AIDS, refugees/internally displaced persons/asylum seekers, extreme poor, urban, rural and out-of-school youth. 

Measurable impact is core to our mission. We aim to have a best-in-class monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system and integrate lessons learned into our program design, which we are constantly iterating and improving. We employ a range of learning tools to solicit feedback from key stakeholders, quickly integrating new learning and adapting our model to ensure we are delivering maximal impact. Educate! holds workshops for key stakeholders to present hypotheses on specific learning questions, and suggest improvements which can be integrated into program design. 

Since inception in 2009, Educate!’s model was designed to respond to the needs of youth. In the early stages of its design, Educate! conducted more than 80 hours of interviews with Ugandan youth to learn about the challenges they faced. Building on this knowledge, Educate! used feedback from youth, as well as local and global education experts and stakeholders, to develop a model that would directly provide skills and experiences that youth—and employers—value most.

Educate! was founded to address one of Africa’s most pressing problems – the mismatch between secondary education and employment opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa –with the ultimate goal of empowering African youth who are left behind with the skills to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs, and drive development in their communities. By changing the landscape of education to reflect the real-life challenges and economic realities students will face, Educate! aims to equip each graduating class with the tools to profoundly affect livelihoods, businesses and communities throughout Africa.

Educate! was created when Boris and Eric Glustrom, one of Educate!’s co-founders, were students at Amherst College. In 2002, Eric and Boris traveled to Uganda to visit Benson, a young refugee boy that Eric had sponsored through school. While in Uganda, Boris and Eric met other sponsored students and learned even after graduating, young people couldn’t find work as they lacked the skills needed for the few available jobs. Their education had consisted of memorizing facts for exams or sitting in silence while a teacher lectured, rather than developing skills for life and work.

Boris and Eric were determined to develop a new model for Educate! that would address the mismatch between education and life after school. Angelica Towne joined as the final co-founder and developed the initial Educate! Experience program in 2009, working with partners and building from global best practices to design a curriculum that meets students where they are, helps build their confidence, and equips them with the skills to become leaders and entrepreneurs. Since then, Educate! has continued to rigorously test and improve upon our model to design the successful, scalable model we are implementing today to reach thousands of students across three countries.

Boris emigrated to the U.S. from Latvia at the age of seven and considers himself lucky to have attended a great public school in San Francisco that eventually got him into Amherst College. In his own life, education unlocked a world of opportunity. Boris has seen firsthand the value of an excellent education, and has dedicated himself to giving other young people the same kind of opportunity that allowed him to get to where he is today. Boris was also inspired by stories from co-founder, Eric, about the scholarship program for young refugees in Uganda. 

With that passion in mind, Boris co-founded Educate! to address one of Africa’s most pressing problems. Educate! is now working toward a world where students get out of the classroom where they memorize facts that will help them succeed in their exams, and instead go out in their communities to practice skills that will help them succeed and thrive in their whole lives before and after graduation.

Boris is a visionary leader and strategic thinker driving an impactful and sustainable solution to the global youth employment crisis. He is the powerful force behind Educate!’s innovative model that is helping to equip a generation of young women and men with the skills they need to drive development across the continent. 

Boris’ achievements through his work can be described through Educate!’s success in tackling an urgent problem and commitment and passion to developing a sustainable solution to youth unemployment is core to Educate!’s achievements.

Under Boris’ leadership, Educate! has developed, implemented, and scaled a highly cost-effective, replicable program that has had a measurable impact on youth across Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya. Rigorous evaluations of Educate!’s model, including a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Uganda, found that participants earn nearly 2x the income of their peers towards the end of secondary school. A follow-up RCT assessed medium-term outcomes for students four years after they graduated from the Educate! program. The follow-on RCT and found strong impacts on: 1) soft skills—improved grit, creativity, and self-efficacy; 2) gender-related outcomes—less domestic violence, fewer sexual partners, fewer children, and more egalitarian views; and 3) educational attainment—increased secondary school completion, increased tertiary enrollment for women, and greater likelihood of selecting higher-earning-potential majors (business and STEM areas of study). Importantly, after Educate!, girls were essentially as likely to graduate from secondary school as boys.

COVID-19 caused a major disruption to our in-person delivery when governments shut down schools across our countries of operation, effectively putting us ‘out of business’. The extreme uncertainty of the present moment means we are unsure how long we will have to wait before we can resume our usual programs. 

With the rapidly evolving nature of the pandemic Educate! has work with speed and flexibility to design new ways to reach youth. Boris immediately pivoted the team to designing and deploying a variety of innovative distance learning strategies to engage youth. Recognizing that for many students, this pandemic would mark the end of their academic journeys, Educate! swiftly bolstered alternative mediums of learning by designing and implementing different solutions according to local context and needs while leveraging existing partnerships.

Boris developed agile responsive teams to run four to six experiments on a weekly basis to design programs for the environment brought about by COVID. Core to our overall response strategy is that we are not creating “one-off” solutions. All response solutions are designed to fully integrate with our existing, proven programming long-term.

In this way, we envision strengthening our impact beyond what was possible prior to the coronavirus crisis.

Boris has led the Educate! team to build an innovative, scalable, and cost-effective model, specifically built for educational system adoption, allowing for massive scale. 

Educate! scaled its program 14x, expanding from 54 schools in 2013 to over 750 in 2018, bringing its model to some of the hardest-to-reach parts of Uganda. In 2016, Educate! expanded to Northern Uganda, a rural, post-conflict region with a poverty rate more than twice the national average. Launching the program in Northern Uganda involved learning to operate the program over large distances and a different cultural context. 

The expansion to post-conflict Northern Uganda, tested our model’s adaptability in the face of logistical, geographical, and contextual challenges. However, Boris is a thinker and leader with the courage, resolve, resilience, and determination to drive large-scale change to make this vision a reality. Educate! adapted its model to meet these challenges by clustering schools to reduce travel costs and hiring 100% local field staff and Mentors who were able to identify and respond to cultural challenges. Ultimately, Educate! was able to maintain its program delivery quality as well as the cost per school. Lessons learned from the expansion  continue to play a critical role in scaling our work.

N/A

Since 2009, Educate! has been rigorously designing, testing, and iterating on our scalable competency-based model of education. Through extensive piloting, testing, measuring, and evaluating over the last ten years, Educate!’s model has been recognized to be: 

Impactful: Educate! defines success as measurable impact on life outcomes for students. A rigorous randomized evaluation conducted by external researchers has demonstrated that our graduates see dramatic improvements in transferable/soft skills, higher educational attainment, higher-earning majors in university, and improved gender-related outcomes, all of which strongly correlate with enduring, long-term labor market and income outcomes. 

Scalable: Educate!’s most notable innovation is the ability to scale while keeping costs low. While most youth interventions cost between $300 and $1,000 per person, Educate!’s complete cost per student in 2019 for our school solution was $75 (coming down from $104 in 2015). We spent the last 10 years building the most replicable and cost-effective solution possible that can reach massive scale. We are now the largest youth skills provider in East Africa. 

Systems aligned: Educate! has successfully partnered with the governments of Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya to incorporate aspects of the model into each country’s national curriculum. By leveraging the existing infrastructure of national education systems and realizing economies of scale, we are able to increase our reach while keeping costs low.

Educate! exists to create a model of education that is tied to and directly accountable for life outcomes. Over the last ten years, Educate! has designed, tested, and improved our skills-based model of education to address a single, urgent problem: how to work within education systems to achieve cost-effective, measurable impact on life outcomes for youth. All programs are modelled on our proven theory of change in Uganda (our flagship program). We aim to learn how we can scale impact to millions of students through our three solution lines (School Solutions, Education System Solutions, Out-Of-School Youth Solution) while also innovating and strengthening these solutions for long-term sustainability. 

In Schools, we implement our model under the conditions the education system faces—including mirroring its scale and financial constraints—and to create an evidence base for its effectiveness. This experiential in-school model is delivered by an Educate! trained youth mentor and teaches youth key transferable/soft skills such as teamwork, critical thinking, self-confidence, and creativity, layered with “hard” business skills like planning, budgeting, and saving.

Through our Education System Solutions, we partner with governments on national education. We see this work as large-scale research and development on the critical question of how to transform education systems to create sustainable impact on youth life outcomes at scale. 

Our other goal is to design a sustainable model to impact out-of-school youth. Recognizing that no more than 50% of youth will attend secondary school in East Africa, Educate! aims to address the systemic problem of unemployment for out-of-school youth.

In 2019, Learning Point began running a bootcamp-style educational skills course, to equip out-of-school youth with the skills to launch and grow an enterprise in the informal market – starting with the motorcycle (boda-boda) driver/courier industry. We see a huge opportunity for scale and impact here, as the target population is a massive and growing demographic, and the current menu of options for practical post-primary education is fundamentally insufficient and failing to address the reality these youth face. Educate! is currently designing a web based solution to the bootcamp model following COVID-19  restrictions on in person learning.

Population we will serve in one year: Prior to COVID-19 disruptions, Educate! was impacting more than 46,000+ students directly in East Africa through our skills-based education and teacher training programs. Our solution is now broadly reaching about 500,000 more broadly through components of our program in schools, as well as national education reforms. As of 2019, Educate! is the biggest youth service provider in East Africa. 

Population we will serve in five years: By 2025, Educate! aims to directly impact 64,000 students and broadly reach over 500,000 students in East Africa. 

Given the realities of COVID-19 and our shift in how we deliver our program, Educate! is at the moment unable to clearly give a number of individuals impacted by our responsive work. We do know, however, that for our Virtual Student Assessment Platform in Rwanda, more than 44,000 students have engaged with an entrepreneurship or physics question that we have created. Additionally, through our out-of-school youth Program, we hope to impact about 100,000 individuals in the next 12 months.This is encouraging given the current situation and we hope to collect more data on our reach through our various solutions. 

While it is still too early to give any definitive numbers on our response work, we are monitoring the reach and impact of our distance learning programs in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda as we continue implementing our programs.

Educate! Has the following country-level goals: 

Uganda: Leveraging economies of scale to increase impact at low cost 

Directly impacting more than 100,000 youth over three years, and bringing us closer towards our goal of achieving full scale of 1,000 schools (1/3 of all secondary schools in the country) by 2022. Experiment and explore new sustainability measures that bring greater value proposition to schools, making the Educate! experience more sustainable at a direct cost level, with aim of school payments covering the costs of mentors, materials, and transport. 

Rwanda: Iterating on an innovative program to support reforms 

Continue to build teacher and education system capacity to sustainably implement Rwanda’s Competency Based Curriculum through Educate! Exchange, impacting over 50% of secondary schools in Rwanda and 48,000 youth annually across the country. Test innovative school sustainability and incentive strategies that can sustain the education reform in the long term, and be replicated in other countries. 

Kenya: Strengthening government partnerships and experimenting with new model for out-of-school youth 

Deepen our government partnerships with the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD), Teacher Service Commission, and the Ministry of Education as we work together to plan for the long-term sustainability of Kenya’s competence-based curriculum reform, which will impact up to 1.5 million youth annually when it rolls out. Experiment with a new model that brings Educate!’s impact to out-of-school youth for the first time. 

We also intend to deploy our COVID-19 strategies into our regular programs once schools reopen.

COVID-19  has brought unprecedented challenges in the lives of Africa’s youth. Young people are more likely to be employed in insecure, temporary, or informal employment. As the global economy slows, governments restrict movement and require non-essential businesses to close, youth are often the first to lose their jobs, experience decreased hours, and suffer long-term unemployment effects. For young people in Uganda, where the youth unemployment rate is as high as 62% and 90% of young people are projected to work in the informal sector, the impacts of these restrictions and an economic downturn are felt even more sharply.

In addition to the economic implications, the spread of coronavirus has resulted in the most significant and wide-spread disruption to formal education in recent history. The majority of Africa’s youth are left without the opportunity to continue their studies outside of the classroom. In Uganda, over six million secondary age youth are effectively out of school – for many 2020 might be the last time they ever step foot in a classroom. 

Educate!’s main challenge is delivering our services to youth. The pandemic has demonstrated the importance of building resilient education systems, and highlighted the value of providing youth with the critical 21st century skills to tackle life’s adversity. Now more than ever, the world needs an empowered youth generation to lead it, and the skills, opportunity, and impact a quality education provides will be critical to rebuilding communities and economies, ensuring health and security, and charting a new way forward.

Faced with the new challenges that 2020 has brought into our lives and our communities, our core driving concern is always the wellbeing of the youth we serve, and we feel we have a duty to help. 

Our scale and reach, proven impact, partnerships, and the educational/skills products we’ve already developed and extensively evaluated and iterated on have uniquely positioned Educate! to address response efforts in East Africa, particularly as they impact youth. Our coronavirus response activities build on our core competencies as an organization to address a critical need within the overall response efforts: keeping youth engaged with their education and gaining core life skills and training out-of-school youth in business management skills. Educate! will leverage our 10+ years’ experience designing and delivering high-impact competency-based education programs in East Africa. 

To further leverage our ability to reach youth during this time, we have an urgent need for partners to invest in this critical response work, in order to make implementation possible. While we are well-positioned for this response and have moved rapidly to re-organize our team around designing and executing these coronavirus response strategies, this is not what we had anticipated for this year, and we need dedicated funding to make it happen.

Educate!’s work is made possible by a global community of partners who believe in the power of a quality education and in the potential of African youth. Continuing to build strong partnerships with like-minded individuals, investors, stakeholders, and governments is essential to Educate!’s mission and hopes for the future – a future where all youth receive the skills to develop their talents and realize their potential. 

Educate!’s most critical partners are the government actors with whom we collaborate closely on reform efforts and the schools in which we implement our model. Our government partnerships aim to deliver the skills-based education students need through national education systems. We engage with governments to create systems-level change by supporting reforms to the national curriculum, teacher training, school management practices, and examinations so that the innovations we make today impact as many students as possible now and in the generations to come. 

We currently have active partnerships with the Rwanda Education Board (REB) and the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD), and we have previously worked with the Ugandan Ministry of Education and the Ugandan National Curriculum Development Center (NCDC) to implement skills-based learning in secondary education and integrate a more practical national entrepreneurship curriculum. 

Additionally, we have partnered with a range of education experts to design teacher training content, including STIR Education, specialists in teacher engagement and motivation, and Kyambogo University, the national teacher training college of Uganda.

Many African governments are acutely aware of the challenges their education systems face and concerned about the implications for the future of their countries. Across the continent, there is a growing movement for skills-based education with 10+ countries engaged in education reforms over the last decade. However, many governments lack the capacity or expertise to effectively implement these reforms. 

As the youth bulge continues to surge, governments urgently need solutions that will lead to effective, sustainable education systems change. Educate! has tested and innovated on a solution to support governments in achieving this goal.

In the next three years, we are focused on scale and sustainability. Under Boris’ leadership, Educate! aims to learn how we can grow to impact millions of students. To achieve this goal, Educate! works in three ways: 1) we directly deliver leadership, entrepreneurship, and workforce readiness training directly in secondary schools (School Solutions); 2) leveraging lessons from direct delivery to support governments in integrating competency-based education into national education reforms in East Africa (Education Systems Solutions); and 3) building a new educational solution to impact out-of-school youth (Learning Point Program). 

We are working to create a model of education that is tied to, and directly accountable for life outcomes, ensuring our impact persists long after students have left our program. Our long term impact evaluation focuses on several target metrics for youth, including:

• Increased soft/transferable skills

• Increased educational attainment

• Increased gender-related outcomes

• Increased business ownership

• Improved employment

To ensure financial sustainability, Educate!’s revenue strategy seeks out aligned funding partners to invest in initial program/product development and general research and development. We then work towards building sustainable business models to deliver core impact, with a non-philanthropy payer (youth, school, governments, bi/multilaterals, etc.) as the long-term financing source. Each of the solution lines has a pathway to long-term sustainability, and the goal is always to avoid committing to work unless there is an established payer or sustainability pathway.

Educate!’s budget has grown 323% over the past 5 years, from $1,317,422 in 2014 to $5,572,001 in 2019. Our work is supported through a global network of more than 50 philanthropic partnerships. Our key funder retention rate of 86% from 2018 to 2019 highlights Educate!’s ability to successfully fulfill partnership deliverables and keep partners actively engaged.

We have raised $1.8 M towards our $6 M goal in 2021. We will continue to seek investments from both current and new partners to reach this goal.

*Please contact us for further details.

Educate!’s  goal is to raise $6,000,000 in 2021. 

*Please contact us for further details.

Educate!’s projected expenses for 2020 total to approximately $6 million. We expect similar expenses in 2021. 

*Please contact us for further details.

Boris will invest the financial prize into Educate!’s research and development and implementation of our activities. Additionally, Educate!’s plans for the coming years include response efforts towards the impact of COVID-19 on our programming in East Africa: 

Distance learning in Uganda - We are delivering Experience model to Ugandan youth using radio and robocalls, interactive voice response (IVR), SMS and remote mentorship for follow-up assessment, engagement, and mentorship on starting appropriate projects and businesses.

Additionally, we aim to reach full scale in Uganda, 1,000 schools (1/3 of all secondary schools in Uganda) by 2022. 

Radio Learning in Rwanda - We are partnering with the Rwanda Education Board (REB) to deliver two core, practical secondary subjects (Entrepreneurship and Science) to radio. REB has approved 17 radio lesson scripts on diverse topics such as socio-economic development and making an electric circuit. We’ve contributed entrepreneurship questions to the Ministry of Education’s USSD system for at-home student Quizzes. 

We aim to complete teacher-training research and development by scaling to more schools and integrating learnings from our RCT and testing and integrating incentive and sustainability structures. 

Serving Out-of-school youth in Kenya - We are creating a virtual e-learning platform for boda boda (motorcycle courier) drivers, focused on how to safely and effectively do delivery during the pandemic as well as how to strengthen their business and improve earnings. We are exploring an opportunity to work with the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development on developing radio curriculum for the subject area Community Service Learning.

Educate! seeks new partnerships over the coming years to scale up our solutions and invest in research and development for the long-term sustainability of our impact. 

This is a critical moment for Educate!, when we have more evidence than ever before of our impact, and the opportunity to scale up this impact to reach thousands more youth in Africa yearly. Even with the uncertainty of the current environment, Educate! feels a sense of urgency to continue pushing forward sustainability strategies across all of our solution lines and response activities. We need partners willing to invest in this important research and development work, which is a critical investment in the future of our organization and the millions of youth we hope to impact in the years to come. In the immediate term, Educate! seeks strategic partnerships to assist with improved costs for SMS & Outbound IVR and marketing partnerships for radio.

Partnerships are key to our success. Educate! primarily partners with impact-oriented foundations for long-term partnerships. We seek out partners who share our values and our vision for the work, and work with them to scale our impact. 

We welcome opportunities to explore partnerships with peer organizations, and governments to help us further our responsive work. Some of our biggest needs as stated above are in improving the costs for SMS & Outbound IVR and also marketing for partnerships for our radio programing. We also seek partners to help us to scale up our solutions and invest in research and development for the long-term sustainability of our impact.