Alternative education for girls that can’t access secondary
Educate!, Uganda, Kenya
Overview
Africa has the world’s fastest-growing and youngest population. Whether this will be a blessing or a curse in the next 20 years depends largely on how African youth take ownership of their future.
Due to various constraints, less than half of youth in East Africa attend academic secondary school. In particular, girl youth face unique and greater barriers to education. In rural areas of East Africa, less than 1 in 20 girls graduate from secondary school. Young women, particularly those who have been denied traditional secondary education, urgently need the tools to improve their livelihoods and become drivers of development in their communities.
Our vision is for every girl to receive a post-primary school education, even if she does not have access to or complete secondary schooling. To address this challenge, Educate! has developed intensive, short and accessible bootcamps. In 2021, building on a decade of serving 160 000 youth and evidence from rigorous evaluations, we piloted low-cost bootcamps in Uganda and Kenya, focusing on the skills training of young girls to succeed in today’s economy. These bootcamps have the potential to close the gap for girls who can’t access secondary school, as well as give them a competitive advantage. This solution has the potential to reach thousands of out-of-school girl youth across Africa, thereby making a significant contribution to assisting African girl youth to take ownership of her future.
Good practice approach
Our intensive skills-based bootcamps are short, accessible and based on the three core components of Educate!’s successful randomised controlled trial (RCT)-backed model:
- Skills and business model training sessions: Training on cross-cutting soft and transferable skills, entrepreneurship, and specific business models that are validated as well suited to youth, such as producing and selling organic fertiliser, eco-friendly charcoal briquettes, sanitary pads, and food/agricultural value addition products.
- Practical sessions and experience: Participants practice applying skills and implementing validated business models through simulation or experimentation. Independent assignments give experience in skills such as research, prototyping, and creating business models.
- Mentoring sessions: Our bootcamps are facilitated by trained mentors who are themselves youth entrepreneurs with the experience to tailor their approaches to youth with limited access to technology. Youth receive constructive coaching and direct feedback from the mentor and fellow group members on independent assignments.
Through the bootcamps, participants build:
- Transferable skills like character, citizenship, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity; and entrepreneurial skills like sales and marketing, business planning, project and self-management, financial literacy and resource mobilisation; and
- Business-model specific skills like product-making, common business challenges, business modeling, customer acquisition and customer service. Teaching the business model means teaching the technical skills as well as full business skills.
Key results
Retention and participation: In Uganda, 87.7% of youth that signed up for the program were girls. 75% finished the programme (85% of which were girls). In addition, 66% of participants completed seven output activities.
Business start-up: In Uganda, 75% of youth either started a business during the bootcamp, or planned to start one shortly after the programme ended.
Virtual training: Running the bootcamp virtually led to the successful start-up of businesses and allowed for flexibility in timing and access. At the end of the bootcamp, 38.7% of youth surveyed had started businesses, and 36.2% reported that they intended to start soon.
Lessons learnt
Success factors
Business selection: Feedback on the selection of businesses offered was appropriate, as it was “reasonably manageable” for participants to start up one of the four offered businesses, acquire materials and develop their products.
Mentorship: Additional feedback was that mentoring sessions were helpful, and that one-on-one sessions helped them overcome challenges.
Challenges/barriers
Expectations around raising capital: In our first Kenya pilot, youth noted that they had expected Educate! to provide a capital investment for them to start up a business. In response, we plan to add training content around raising capital and financial literacy into the Kenya bootcamp.
Government receptiveness: Our vision is that governments will implement bootcamps as a low-cost alternative to secondary education. However, working with government structures involves many uncertainties. To mitigate this, we plan to seek funding to scale up from large institutions like major foundations and bi/multilaterals.
Moving forward
Our plan to develop bootcamps for out-of-school girl youth has three stages:
1) 2021-2022: Discovery and validation – We are currently piloting and iterating to build a bootcamp that leads to the most impactful experience for youth.
2) 2023-2024: Efficiency/piloting scale – Once we’ve refined our solution, we will pilot it at scale, to ensure the high impact continues even as we grow to reach more youth.
3) 2025: Scale – After we are confident that we will achieve high impact at scale, we will move forward to large scale (such as nation-wide implementation).
In the long term, our vision is for the bootcamp educational tool to be funded by governments and incorporated into national education systems. Our hope is that the concept of alternative pathways to education and entrepreneurship gains sufficient interest and traction for other options to be developed in various fields.
Resources
Educate!’s Out-of-School Youth Solutions
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Goalkeepers Accelerator: Educate!
J-PAL Highlights Educate!’s Impact on Girls’ Education Outcomes
USAID Features Educate!’s Impact in Soft Skills Literature Review
BBC Features Educate! in Series "People Fixing the World"
Educate! Selected by United Nations’ Generation Unlimited
Contact Information:
Email us: educate@experienceeducate.org
