APPROACH
Educate! provides business and leadership training, offers mentorship, gives students experience starting an enterprise, and does it all with a highly trained teacher for 16-20 upper secondary students. Educate! commits to scaling its model to reach 35,000 upper secondary Ugandan high school students within the next two years. To achieve this goal, the organization will scale its core program which delivers the model directly to students and builds the long term capacity of schools to do it themselves.
Educate! brings to this commitment five years of experience developing the model, its expertise in identifying and training teachers and working with schools, its in-depth knowledge of Ugandan youth, and experience working on a systems level, having already incorporated its curriculum into Uganda's national entrepreneurship curriculum.
ACTION PLAN
Over the next two years, Educate! will embark on an effort to rapidly scale its scale. In September 2013, it will begin by marketing the model to schools with the goal of acquiring 150 schools that will each pay at least $100 a year for Educate!'s program.
By February 2014, the model will be launched to 150 or more schools, impacting 15,000 students, with a focus on Kampala and East Uganda regions. During the summer of 2014, an improved sales process will be deployed in order to grow the total number of schools to 200 and to increase school subscription rates to $150 or more.
In early 2015, the lessons from the 2014 scale up will be incorporated into everyday practice and improved upon within the expanded structure of the 200 schools and 20,000 new students. Finally, in July 2015, Educate! will prepare to launch in a new region in Uganda, begin sales process, and set a growth target of 300 total schools and 30,000 new students by the start of 2016.
Ugandan youth live in a very difficult environment: the country has the youngest population in the world (50% under 15), the highest youth unemployment (83%), and the highest youth poverty rate (94%). Even increased access to education hasn't proven to help: the pursuit of upper secondary education (the last two years of secondary school) has not resulted in increased incomes and only 34% of university graduates manage to find formal employment.
To improve this situation, youth need to be prepared and supported to become leaders and entrepreneurs. This preparation will enable them to build confidence and self-efficacy, take leadership initiative and participate in their communities, create small businesses and improve their livelihoods. Right now, however, the education system in Uganda, the biggest lever to address this challenge, does not adequately prepare youth to become leaders and entrepreneurs.
Additional funding will allow Educate! to scale faster and deliver their model to more schools requesting it. Educate!'s Ten Year Vision is to reach one million youth annually across ten countries in Sub-Saharan African. In response to the huge demand for skills-based education, they have expanded rapidly, exceeding their own expectations. They took a big leap in 2014 by scaling from 54 to over 250 schools and 87,500 students. Today they work in 12 percent of secondary schools in Uganda, reaching over 120,000 youth! They are on track to add 100 additional new partner schools in 2017, and to continue to scale to reach the goal of working in 1,000 schools, or "roughly one third of all secondary schools across the country" by 2024.
Educate! is also seeking resources and best practices that would support the organization in overcoming challenges as they scale their model across Africa in the following two areas: partnerships with African governments and support with the operational aspect of scaling Educate!
