GIVING UGANDA’S YOUTH AN EDUCATION FOR A WINNING FUTURE
By: The Partnership, Psipse
Tags: Africa, Entrepreneurship, Life Skills, Sdgs, Education

Senior 3 teacher Solomon Bbosa, a teacher at Entebbe Secondary School who teaches a business and entrepreneurship skills lab that teaches students skills to help them find their confidence to meet today’s economic and employment challenges.

“Zip…Zap…Zoom,” the students of senior 3 at Entebbe Secondary School shout among each other.

They are standing in a circle alongside their teacher Mr. Bbosa, who is leading their business and entrepreneurship class today. But before they can jump into the lesson on credit transactions, Mr. Bbosa is giving them an energizer group exercise to wake them up.

The energizer is just the start of a three-part 80-minute lesson, called skills lab, based on a pedagogy that gets the students to build, practice, and present their work. So Mr. Bbosa will spend the first 20 minutes teaching the ins and outs of credit transactions, before the students practice by creating their own paperwork in small groups, and then presenting their work to the rest of the class.

“The presentations will be at random so I want everyone to participate,” Mr. Bbosa tells them as they get into their small groups. He has turned what could easily have been a very rote lesson into one that keeps the students’ attention throughout.

Skills lab — best exemplified by Mr. Bbosa’s business and entrepreneurship class — is a one-year course that teaches students soft and hard skills to help them find their confidence to meet today’s economic and employment challenges.

“It guarantees the learners keep up with the work we have for them,” Mr. Bbosa said.

The skills lab was created by Educate!, an NGO that tackles high youth unemployment by partnering with schools and governments in Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya to reform what schools teach and how they teach it so that students have the skills to start businesses, get jobs, and drive development in their communities.

“Right now you have secondary school education systems that are often failing to teach students the skills that they need to succeed in a modern economy where a majority of them are projected to work in the informal sector,” said Hayley Doner, Head of East Africa External Relations for Educate! “So you have teachers at the front of the room dictating as students take notes and memorize facts that ultimately don’t serve them when they head out into a workplace.”

The organization’s work is best showcased through Educate! Experience, their 10-year-old flagship program used in over 750 secondary schools across Uganda (25 percent of the nation’s schools). Educate! Experience works to cause school wide change by looking at the key stakeholders in these schools: the students and the teachers.

One of the more popular aspects of the Educate! Experience here at Entebbe Secondary School, located right outside Uganda’s capital of Kampala, is the Educate! Club. This student-run business club teaches students how to start and run their own enterprises. The club creates and sells everything from freshly made juices and chocolate donuts to liquid soap, bar soap, sandals, and baskets.

“We are known to have successful ideas and projects with good results,” said Miriam, 16, president of the club. One of their most popular enterprises, for example, involves selling popcorn during movie nights at the boarding school.

“We take the profits and reinvest them into supplies and creating more products and trying more ideas,” she said. “I have learned a lot and want to keep learning.”

As for how the Educate! has impacted her life, she paused to think before answering.

“Dealing with Educate! is like dealing with your future,” she finally said. “If you stick with Educate!, they also stick with you!”