Sustainability at Scale: How Educate! is Leveraging Evidence to Deepen Youth Impact through National Education Systems

• In Event: Evidence as a tool for adaptation, adjustment, and scale through systems

Proposal

Educate! works to prepare youth with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. We have developed an evidence-based model for integrating skills-based learning — which leads to improved life outcomes for youth — into national education systems. This approach consists of three stages: (1) policy reform, (2) in-service government teacher training, and (3) the integration of sustainability structures. Once the three steps are complete, we will have successfully reoriented an education system to support the delivery of skills-based education without Educate!’s direct involvement.

In 2015, joining Rwanda's effort to reform its curriculum, Educate! advised the Rwanda Education Board (REB) as they reformed the Entrepreneurship subject. The new competency-based curriculum included a vehicle for active learning pedagogy as well as student business clubs. The focus shifted to ensuring the reform effort resulted in an improved educational experience for youth. To meet that need, Educate! developed a two-year teacher training program, the Educate! Exchange, to support teachers in adopting the new pedagogy.

Given the dearth of evidence around effective ways to improve teacher pedagogy and student outcomes, particularly at the secondary level, Educate! partnered with researchers from Oregon State University, the World Bank, and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) as well as REB and Akazi Kanoze Access to conduct a randomized evaluation to study the impact of the Educate! Exchange program. At the end of the program, teachers were 19 percent more likely to use active instruction techniques critical to fostering skill development. When researchers followed up with the youth in the study 6 months after they completed secondary school, youth in the intervention group maintained higher levels of business ownership and were also more likely to be enrolled in university (Blimpo and Pugatch 2021). To date, Educate! has trained teachers in 55 percent of secondary schools in Rwanda. We plan to reach the remaining schools by 2025.

The next phase of work involves ensuring that this impact is sustained through the system. In Rwanda, Educate! continues to install key system-level structures which incentivize long-term adoption. One critical system-level incentive is the national exam. Educate! partnered with the National Examination and School Inspection Authority (NESA) in Rwanda to co-develop a new national assessment policy and supporting system. Rather than relying solely on high-stakes, summative exams, this new policy draws 10 percent of the national exam score from continuous assessments. To enable this, Educate! and NESA developed the Comprehensive Assessment Management Information System (CA-MIS), a data system that allows teachers to upload student data to a national platform. The system officially launched during the 2022-2023 academic year, and since rollout, Educate! and its government partners continuously work to refine the system, how it interfaces with other data systems, and ensure that it meets stakeholders’ needs.

In this session, Educate! will share how we are using evidence to strengthen the link between education and youth life outcomes, lessons learned about how to scale effective programs through education systems and key open questions for the next stage of work.

Author

• Sarah Ojuando Ndinya, Educate!