Closing the Gap: Leveraging Evidence to Build and Scale an Alternative Learning Model for Out-of-School Girls in East Africa

• In Event: Scale is Necessary: Evidence-based Approaches to Youth Empowerment and Skilling

Proposal

Approximately 50% of young people are currently out of school across East Africa, with only 1 in 20 rural girls on track to complete secondary education. The massive disparities in both educational access and completion exclude many young people from the critical skill-building experiences necessary to facilitate successful transitions into a 21st-century economy. Recognizing the vast gap that exists in equitable access to secondary education, Educate! - a non-profit social enterprise - is building an alternative learning pathway for youth left out of formal education systems. This pathway, structured as a short-term, accessible, and inclusive bootcamp model, aims to equip youth with important skills that enable them to exercise agency, grit, and resilience within their lives, launch successful enterprises, and become active leaders within their communities.

Educate! will discuss insights gleaned while building and scaling this new model - attempting to bridge the skills gap for out-of-school youth by leveraging a foundation of existing evidence. One critical piece of research informing this new intervention is the Skills for Effective Entrepreneurship Development program, or SEED, which was run in partnership with Educate!, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), and researchers from The University of California, Berkeley in 2013. The SEED program was a 3-week program for high school graduates in Uganda modeled after Western business school curricula and adapted to the Ugandan context. The program included a hard skills curriculum, a soft skills curriculum, and a business planning curriculum. A randomized evaluation examining impacts 3-years post-intervention found that youth who participated in SEED earned around 30% more than peers in the comparison group, were more likely to run businesses, and had gained important skills (Chioda et al 2021). Overall, the evaluation demonstrated that an accessible and condensed learning experience can lead to meaningful impact on life outcomes for youth.

Today, Educate! is leveraging this evidence to pilot multi-week residential and non-residential livelihood bootcamps for young women in rural Uganda and Kenya. The core of the model is comprised of an interactive curriculum - modeled after SEED - coupled with ongoing mentorship provided by local, highly-trained youth mentors. The bootcamps aim to shift outcomes on income, business creation, and savings behavior in order to support out-of-school youth to transition into Uganda’s informal economy.

The team is taking a scaffolded approach to evidence generation - adjusting the rigor as the program model advances through development. Educate!’s teams are currently running continuous pre-/post- evaluations on the proof of concept to observe consistent and sustained impacts that indicate the model is ready for further scale-up. For example, after proving initial validation through pre-/post- measurement, the organization plans to conduct a controlled evaluation to generate rigorous evidence of impact. Ultimately, the organization aims to develop an inclusive and accessible skills model, backed by rigorous evidence of impact, that can be scaled to bridge that gap for out-of-school youth across East Africa. Educate! will share the results of these early tests and discuss its experience iteratively building a model and continuously generating evidence of effectiveness as it scales.

Author

• Meghan C Mahoney, Educate!