Youth Venture

Empowering Africa's future leaders

Educate! disrupts the rote-memorization based education system that is common to much of the developing world with an education based on students’ ability to lead change in their communities.
Educate! equips students to create social enterprises by teaching a two-year leadership curriculum within secondary schools and providing long-term mentoring and an alumni network. In doing so, Educate! empowers students to capitalize on opportunities to solve the challenges facing their communities, stimulate local economies, and become a force of internally driven development. In addition, the process of creating a social enterprise helps students build leadership skills (community mobilization, effective communication, and teamwork), business skills (opportunity identification, market research, product development, and financial literacy), resourcefulness, confidence, and a strong vision of change, thus laying the foundation for students to become socially responsible leaders in the future.
Rather than building a single highly powerful school or developing a leadership or social entrepreneurship program outside of the formal education system Educate! incorporates the creation of a social enterprise (and supporting leadership curriculum and mentoring) into the education system itself. Educate!’s approach allows the organization to: 1. Reach a much larger number of students; and 2. Build the capacity of the school system from within.
Educate! is beginning in Uganda where it will reach a critical mass of students and incorporate the creation of a social enterprise into the education system. Once the model is established in Uganda, Educate! will expand to other countries.
Educate! envisions a world in which education provides all youth with the experience to become the next generation of socially responsible leaders.