Educate! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. We are a non-profit social enterprise with 150 staff and 300 volunteer youth mentors. 

We tackle youth unemployment by partnering with schools and governments to reform what schools teach and how they teach it so that students in Africa have the skills to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs and drive development in their communities. Our model is delivered through practically-trained teachers and youth mentors. Educate!’s goal is to make this practical, skills-based model part of national education systems.

Check out our COVID response page on our website to see how we’ve adapted to respond to school closures in East Africa in 2020.

In 2019, we partnered with the government to pilot in 60+ schools in Kenya, worked in 275+ secondary schools in Rwanda, and 800+ schools in Uganda (25% of the country), reaching over 46,000 students intensively and 470,000 more broadly. Two rigorous external evaluations, including a randomized controlled trial, found that towards the end of secondary school, our program participants earn nearly DOUBLE the income of their peers. A follow-up RCT found that four years later, our graduates demonstrate large and durable shifts in skills, coupled with significant improvements in education and gender equity-related outcomes. Girls achieve even greater results. Our graduates change their lives and their communities, such as Daniel who leveraged both his medical education and the transferable and business skills gained through Educate! to open a rural health clinic in his community employing two people and conducting about 350 checkups per month.

We have been backed by top foundations such as MasterCard, Big Bang Philanthropy, Mulago, Echoing Green, Ashoka, and Global Innovation Fund. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize (and was featured in a video), a 2015 WISE Award, and was highlighted by Bill Gates, in the World Bank’s S4YE's Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, Forbes 30 under 30, and The Brookings Institution as one of 14 case studies in their global scaling education learning initiative. Educate! was also selected by the UN’s Generation Unlimited as 1 of 20 innovative youth solutions. 

Educate!'s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year.