Boris Bulayev’s Post

Powerful post from my teammate Marit Blaak, PhD about what's happening in our livelihood bootcamps for rural girls and young women in Uganda right now.

At Educate! we take culture very seriously. One of the things we did in October 2022 as we emerged from COVID was to do a weeklong leadership induction for our top 40 leaders on Educate!'s culture (https://lnkd.in/dYj_xTxG) and the core principles to how we work. We reinforced this in October 2023. Last week, we did this for our Managers and Specialists. It was a joy to join part of it. Sarah Kenyi wrote a great article on the experience and her top three takeaways.

Since 2019, Educate! has been building livelihood bootcamps for out-of-school youth who don’t complete school, focusing on rural girls and young women. Following COVID, we leaned into this work more heavily in 2021, and now have data from 5 cohorts of youth, before and after the bootcamp, that tracks income and employment gains 3 and 6 months after. Across 5 data sets, youth are seeing at least 50% relative income gains and 25% absolute increases in business ownership (¼ of youth have a business who didn’t before). And that’s the lowest outcomes we’ve seen. In one bootcamp, youth experienced 149% income gains 6 months later, and in another cohort, 170% 3 months after. A number of bootcamps saw up to ⅓ of youth launch a business who didn’t have one before. This has been very fun to see. It demonstrates the power of 1) a really transformative learning experience for youth (where they’re not just told what to do but learn everything by doing), and 2) building something HYPER relevant to the needs of young people, driven by youth feedback and iterated on over time. From the beginning Educate! has wanted to build learning experiences that enable youth to transition from education to employment. We believe education should be accountable to life outcomes. It’s been cool to see what Educate!’s core approach - delivering transformative experiences that develop the essential skills youth need succeed in today’s economy - can do when serving young people left out of school, and how quickly it can turn into meaningful income and employment gains. More to come! #youthemployment #21stcenturyskills #21stcenturylearning #21stcenturyeducation #livelihoods

Great article from the Economist about the importance of travel and seeing things for yourself: https://lnkd.in/erEsMk9V Pasting key paragraph (it was about stock analysts): "The paper shows that the forecasts of well-travelled analysts were also significantly more accurate than those of their peers. Causality is hard to establish: perhaps better forecasters earn more freedom to roam the world. However, the authors demonstrate that when the covid-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, clipping the wings of analysts who had previously travelled frequently, the accuracy of their forecasts deteriorated disproportionately. Travel helps analysts." I was reminded this myself during a trip to see our education reform work in Tanzania last month. My understanding of the work, the opportunity, the successes and the challenges grew 10X from being there - nothing that reading docs or being on calls could replicate. It was quite remarkable. Yet it's so easy to fall back into the routine and prioritize day to day work. A never-ending battle... but a good reminder how much it matters.

It happened - our vision to help every secondary student in Rwanda gain the skills to get employment and build a dignified livelihood has gone 100% national! Initially launched in #rwanda in 2016, Educate!’s approach to co-designing an #employment -focused subject in #secondary school has three stages: 1) co-designing policy with government, 2) training teachers, and 3) creating sustainability structures. We completed stage 1 in 2016 in partnership with Akazi Kanoze, and supported the government in an update to the mandatory upper secondary entrepreneurship subject in 2022. Stage 2 involves a 2-year evidence-based teacher training model. We built and evaluated that model pre-COVID, bringing it to a third of schools. Now, thanks to a major investment from MacKenzie Scott and others, our two-year teacher training model is going national - reaching every upper secondary school nationwide! Stage 3 is also far along - with partners, we've helped build a continuous #assessment data system that has been rolled out to all grades and subjects, far exceeding our initial hopes and dreams. And soon, data from that system will begin contributing to national exam scores for certain subjects, helping shift the system away from a high stakes exam to continuous practical learning! Special thanks to Dubai Cares for being our foundational partner in this work and believing in the bigger potential of it all early, as well as to Vitol Foundation, UBS Optimus Foundation and Wellspring Philanthropic Fund for helping make it all possible! Very excited for all of this and so proud of the team that has been working on this for over 8 years. And thrilled about the prospect of bringing this model to Tanzania next year.