Equipping youth with skills for the future: An evidence-based approach to skill development

• In Event: What works in adolescent skills: How evidenced, localized solutions are equipping young people with the skills that Africa needs

Proposal

Educate! works to prepare youth with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. We tackle youth unemployment by partnering with youth, schools, and governments in Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania. We design and deliver solutions that equip young people with the skills to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs, and drive community development.

Educate!’s evidence-based, learning experience delivers essential skills youth need to transition into the workforce. The model teaches both hard skills (planning, budgeting, market research) and transferable skills (communication, critical thinking, creativity) crucial for securing a livelihood. Given the substantial scale of the informal economy, for many young people in Africa, this means starting a small enterprise.

Educate! delivers a core student experience that includes three components: practical skills training, hands-on experience starting and running a business, and mentoring. This experience outlines the critical components of programs that rigorous evaluations of Educate!’s programs have linked to improvements in short- and long-term youth outcomes. It provides program strategy teams with a benchmark, ensuring consistent, high-quality learning experiences across programs while allowing teams to remain adaptable, tailoring the curriculum and delivery structure to youth’s needs.

This model has been validated through several rigorous evaluations, which found that Educate! programs had positive impacts on a range of outcomes, including teacher pedagogy, youth income, employment, gender equity, family planning, and educational attainment. A randomized evaluation of our co-curricular program for secondary students found that towards the end of secondary school, Educate! participants earn nearly double the income of their peers. Four years later, students who participated in Educate!’s program saw lasting improvements in transferable skills, educational attainment, and gender-related outcomes such as delayed family formation, more equitable gender attitudes, and reductions in intimate partner violence. A second randomized evaluation of Educate!’s teacher training and support program designed to support the rollout of a competency-based curriculum reform in Rwanda found that teachers who participated were 19% more likely to deliver interactive lessons which centre students. This positive impact on the learning environment also translated into improvements in business ownership and university enrolment for youth six months after they graduated.

Educate! is scaling this approach through two pathways: 1) introducing an employment-focused subject in secondary schools, and 2) delivering livelihood bootcamps for out-of-school youth, with a focus on marginalized rural girls and young women. In school, we integrate skills-based education into national curricula, focusing on policy reform, teacher training, and sustainable practices to enhance youth outcomes. For out-of-school youth, we work to build accessible bootcamps that deliver critical skills training and mentorship to improve life outcomes to youth left behind by formal secondary education.

During this panel, Educate! will share lessons from over 15 years of implementing skill development programs for adolescents, highlighting what makes its programs effective, how it ensures a consistent student experience while allowing for local adaptation, its thinking around essential skills for youth, results from external evaluations, and our approach to scaling these models.

Author

• Meghan C Mahoney, Educate!