The Educate! Exchange

12 Aug

MLC PIONEER* | Created by Educate!

The Educate! Exchange is a new, innovative solution designed to support educators in adopting and implementing the new skills-based entrepreneurship curriculum, so that changes in policy actually lead to changes in the classroom. The ultimate goal is to transform and improve education for tens of thousands of youth.

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365,000 Lives Impacted

Two rigorous external evaluations of our flagship in-school model, including a randomized controlled trial, found that towards the end of secondary school, participants earn nearly double the income of their peers. A follow-up RCT found that four years later, youth achieve strong and lasting shifts in skills, coupled with significant improvements in education and gender equity-related outcomes, especially young women. Our graduates change their lives and their communities, such as Daniel who opened a rural health clinic in his community employing two people and conducting about 350 checkups per month.

We have been backed by top foundations such as MasterCard, Big Bang Philanthropy, Echoing Green, Ashoka and Global Innovation Fund. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize, a 2015 WISE Award, and was highlighted by Bill Gates in the World Bank’s S4YE Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, Forbes 30 Under 30, The Brookings Institution, and in the BBC series "People Fixing the World". Educate! was also selected by the UN’s Generation Unlimited as 1 of 20 innovative youth solutions and by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a Goalkeepers Accelerator.

The Innovation

Our goal is to design skills-based education and employment solutions which impact youth life outcomes sustainably and at scale. In Rwanda, Educate! serves as a technical advisor to the Rwanda Education Board (REB) on the design and rollout of the government’s competence-based curriculum (CBC) reform. In 2015, we integrated three key components of our impact-proven model into Rwanda’s new upper secondary entrepreneurship curriculum: 1) Skills Lab—Educate!’s interactive, student-centered pedagogy; 2) Student Business Clubs, an experiential platform for students to start real businesses at school; 3) Portfolios—a series of activity assignments, which provide evidence that students have mastered a learning objective. After a three-year rollout process, 147,000 students annually across Rwanda are now receiving this reformed curriculum. Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve pivoted to create and deploy a distance learning model based on our proven in-school experience, and reached over 100,000 students by October 2020. Educate!'s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year.

About Educate!

Educate! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. Since 2009, we have partnered with youth, schools and governments in Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya, and are now the biggest youth skills provider in East Africa.

*Educate! is an MLC Pioneer Member. The MLC Pioneer cohort aimed to highlight innovations that have scaled to meet the needs of a significant proportion (i.e. 40%+) of their target populations. This cohort was included in the 2019 and 2020 application rounds, however it was phased out in 2021.