Educate! Post-Primary Bootcamp for Girls

In east Africa, 36% of girls do not attend secondary school (UNESCO Digital Library). This disparity is even more pronounced in Uganda where 84% of girls do not receive a post-primary education (Education Policy Data Center). Over the next 5 years, Educate! will design, build, pilot, and scale a viable alternative pathway for girls who cannot access academic secondary in Uganda, equipping them with the skills to overcome gender, racial, and inequality barriers in a more affordable and accessible way. Educate! will do this through short, intensive, mentor-led bootcamps for 8,000+ girls in Uganda. Overtime, we plan to make a meaningful dent in access to post-primary education for girls by building an accessible, affordable, and condensed learning experience that creates a significant impact on gender equity, and work to build the pathway for this to be part of the government’s national education system.

More than 15% of primary aged girls in Uganda don’t attend school. By the time secondary school begins, this number has risen to an alarming 84% . For those enrolled, the colonial education system contributes to a highly inequitable and inaccessible system which has perpetuated high unemployment rates, lack of opportunity, and cycles of poverty, allowing the potential of youth to remain untapped(MDPI). Additionally, girls face unique and greater barriers to success as entrepreneurs, in the workforce, and as leaders in their communities. Girls need the tools to tackle these barriers, to improve their livelihoods and become drivers of development. 

Educate! combats this deeply rooted problem by building and advocating for a system of equitable education opportunities. Recently, we’ve experimented with and built a solid base of evidence indicating that intensive bootcamp experiences can lead to improved employment and gender outcomes. Covid-19 and schools closing further increased our focus on alternative models. Based on our previous in-school work and evidence collected, we seek to leverage the bootcamp model to serve as a more affordable, alternative education and employment pathway for girls who cannot access secondary school, a number that is predicted to increase as a result of the pandemic.

To address the education gap for girls who are not able to access secondary education, Educate! proposes to design and build bootcamps targeted at improving gender equity, employment and life outcomes for girls. The concept is to run and scale short, intensive skills-based learning experiences that includes activities, discussions, and practical challenges. Bootcamps will be run by “mentors” who are specially-trained youth entrepreneurs, and would comprise of small groups of 20 to 30 participants per 1-2 Mentors. The target group will be unemployed females in the 15-25 age range who experience significant barriers to accessing traditional secondary school. 

After extensive experimentation with a variety low-tech learning channels, we plan to deliver content and facilitation through phone calls, SMS and WhatsApp to provide practical skills training and 1-1 mentorship, with the aim to incorporate in-person engagement once safe.

Through the bootcamp, participants will build the following skills: 

• Transferable skills: citizenship, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity.
• Entrepreneurship skills: sales and marketing, business planning, project and self-management, financial literacy and resource mobilization.
• Business model specific skills: product-making, common business challenges, industry-specific skills, business models (small space farming, small scale manufacturing, etc), customer acquisition and service. 

In Uganda, 84% of girls will not attend secondary school. Our target population will be unemployed females in the 15-25 age range who experience significant barriers to accessing traditional secondary school. They represent a vast and growing demographic living in a context where current options for practical post-primary education is insufficient (largely dominated by traditional academic high school) and fails to address the realities young girls face.

Educate! aims to create a viable alternative to academic secondary school that gives all the skills girls need to succeed and improve income, employment, family planning and gender equity outcomes.  The bootcamps would directly target critical gaps such as the asset gap and the skills gap to change girls’ life outcomes, empowering them with the knowledge they need to have greater self-efficacy and grit, make informed decisions about their lives, and become effective leaders. The bootcamp will not only feature “female friendly” businesses, but would also actively encourage non-traditional female businesses by introducing skills and products that would broaden their options. Participants will build transferable, entrepreneurship (sales, marketing, business planning, project and self-management, financial literacy, resource mobilization) and business model specific skills (product-making, COVID safety, common business challenges, industry-specific skills, customer acquisition and customer service). 

 A randomized controlled trial (RCT)  of our flagship model, the Educate! Experience, showed that female participants increased income 250% and business ownership 152% towards the end of school. Four years later they saw major skill, educational attainment, family planning and gender equity outcomes, including a 25% increase in university enrollment, 21% increase in delayed child-birth and 18% decrease in   inter- partner violence. Furthermore, a 2013 skills bootcamp we helped run was evaluated by UC Berkeley researchers and it showed 36-39% income gains three years after completion; proving that condensed experiences, at point of need can have significant impacts. Our bootcamp model is integrating all our learnings from working with this target population over the last 10 years. We see a tremendous opportunity for disruption and a dramatic reconceptualization of the concept of post-primary education and how it prepares youth for employment. On a grand scale, our aim is to advocate for governments intervention and adoption of this solution. 

The Bootcamp model is the most effective channel for facilitating a meaningful distance learning experience for girls, as the live, one-on-one interactive engagement provided by Educate!’s Mentors are critical to supporting successful skill development. Facilitated entirely through mobile phone, the Bootcamp delivers the same three core components of our flagship in-school model—1) skills lessons, 2) practical experience and mentorship, and 3) assessment of learning—to youth through an accelerated format. Educate! trainings encourage Mentors to think holistically and tailor their approaches to meet the needs of girls in rural/hard to reach places and sometimes with little access to technology.

Since 2019, Educate! has been developing and evaluating our bootcamp model to access youth outside of the formal education system. We’ve piloted bootcamps across several communities and are now looking to leverage this evidence-based bootcamp model to provide alternative education-to-employment pathways for girls who cannot access secondary school.

Educate!’s is approach unique because:

1. It aims to tackle a root problem of inequitable access to post-primary education by creating a viable alternative pathway to traditional secondary education. There are currently few impactful alternatives for youth who cannot access secondary education.
2. There is currently no sustainability structure for an alternative to secondary education. Therefore, Educate! aims to reimagine education for the future to ensure it can fill the skills gap and that youth are able to realize their potential. Long-term, we aim for our solution to be government financed just like public secondary school.
3. It builds on multiple RCTs and rigorous evidence based on youth development in East Africa. This evidence represents some of the most comprehensive body of evidence around impactful interventions. Our bootcamp framework is flexible and designed to create a collection of evidence-driven alternatives tailored for specific industries and different population groups, in this case girls.
4. Educate! aims to teach specific business models best suited for girls. Teaching the business model means not just teaching the technical skill (how to cut hair) but the full business model (how to deliver good customer experiences, which basic technology can help, etc.). This is a shift from vocational school where youth learn narrow technical skills only.

Educate! is running virtual and blended bootcamps for youth in Uganda, allowing us to experiment and validate our model.

• In 2021, we are currently reaching 22,000 youth 
• Discovery and validation stage (2022-2023): During this stage we will be answering questions of how to reach and impact youth, determining stakeholders involved and engagement strategies.
  • Assess best delivery model, including testing virtual, in-person, and blended learning options as the world evolves in a COVID and post-COVID time. This includes identifying and testing assumptions.
  • Run a pilot bootcamp with 3,000 young girls.
• Efficiency stage (2024-2026): Experiment and iterate on the model to ensure that we are achieving the greatest possible impact on youth. We will validate our assumptions and confirm our theory of change.
  • We will reach 27,000 youth total after this stage. We will look to achieve impact include: earning, saving, acting for the future, goal setting and planning.
  • Collect learnings to apply in the following years as we scale.

Educate! has designed and embedded rapid impact assessment into our program development cycle to identify key indicators that determine what leads to skill and knowledge attainment. This assessment will prove if this is happening before reaching the end of the full program, giving us an early look at our potential for long term impact, and allows us to pivot if indicators suggest otherwise.

Discovery & validation stage (2022-2023): We will determine the specific skills we will use as measurement of success as well as measurement of engagement to see what works best to meet youth needs. We will conduct exploratory research/qualitative research to further validate the model.

Efficiency stage (2024-2026): As we scale, we will refine our M&E systems to ensure that we are tracking indicators most closely connected to target outcomes. During this stage, we will extend measurement to the outcome level. We will A/B test our model, using our rapid impact assessment, using different delivery methods to compare and assess which methods lead to the most impact. We will also build data systems and tools to provide real-time information on implementation progress as we test these programs.

Currently 160 full-time staff.

Educate! has over a decade of experience in preparing youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. 

In Uganda, our team is 100% Ugandan, with 90 staff in Kampala and 300+ youth mentors spread across other regions of the country. Our youth mentors were former Educate! graduates, averaging the age of 20. They directly reflect the communities they serve.

Our top two leaders in Uganda, Hawah Nabuyye and Richard Luuba, started their careers at Educate! in 2008 as mentors themselves. Many others have grown professionally within the organization. Hawah is an Acumen Fund Fellow and a Brookings Gender Scholar.

Angelica Townes, who oversees Educate!'s program model development globally, has lived in Africa since 2008, is the product of programs like Educate!, and made her way through inner-city New York schools and got to Middlebury College, thanks to Posse Foundation. Her motivation is to provide that opportunity for others.

Educate!’s team has grown our operation to become the largest youth skills provider in East Africa. In 2019, we intensively impacted 46,000+ youth across 1,000 schools and reached almost 500,000 youth more broadly.

Globally our team is 97% African and the majority of our leadership team is female. We have full-time design and evaluation teams that are focused on delivering the most impact to youth in Africa in an affordable and sustainable way.

At Educate!, we actively work to combat this problem by building a system of equitable and relevant education opportunities.

Beyond barriers to access, the formal education system doesn't deliver education tailored to the needs of most youth. What we have seen is that previous notions of equity were around access to a single standard formal education system, leading to government employment for elites. More advanced, newer notions of equity, largely informed by racial justice movements, are about moving beyond access to this uniform experience to exploring more tailored and relevant experiences. Educate!’s alternative pathway for girls in Uganda is building a tailored education that meets girls where they are recognizing what their priorities are, what their obstacles are, and appropriately responding.

Through our bootcamp solution, Educate! aspires to achieve key gender outcomes similar to girls attending secondary, but in a more cost effective manner. We've seen through long-term RCT results of a study in Ghana (IPA) the returns to a scholarship to secondary school - in other words the impact of access to secondary school. We believe our RCT results demonstrate better cost-effectiveness against those outcomes (since our intervention costs ⅛ the cost of a secondary scholarship), and though not a direct comparison, the results of Educate! are in many ways comparable to the return of a scholarship to four year secondary. Our goal is to see if outcomes of secondary education can be achieved in a faster, more cost-effective way, ultimately making access to post-primary opportunities much more equitable.