Social Innovations
Listening to African Youth
Over the past year, I’ve spent time listening to adolescents and young men and women in urban slums and rural villages in Senegal, Uganda and Kenya. Most of them were between the ages of 12 and 25, and their families were surviving on less than $2 a day. Why this group? Because of the enormous opportunity they present to advance economic growth, social progress and leadership in Africa... (continue reading this blog post)
Over the past year, I’ve spent time listening to adolescents and young men and women in urban slums and rural villages in Senegal, Uganda and Kenya. Most of them were between the ages of 12 and 25, and their families were surviving on less than $2 a day.
Why this group? Because of the enormous opportunity they present to advance economic growth, social progress and leadership in Africa. In many countries, half or more of the population is under the age of 25. While populations elsewhere in the world are aging, Africa is getting younger. By 2025, there will be an estimated 258 million Africans between the ages of 15-24. These demographic trends lend urgency to needs in education, employment, health, environment, and governance. The continent has the highest rate of young people living in poverty, along with the lowest secondary and tertiary education enrollment rates.
While these are sobering facts, appropriate investment in human capital could potentially create a virtuous spiral of sustained economic growth and job creation in Africa. Even small wins have lasting impacts. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, each additional year of schooling increases an individual’s earning by 11.7 per cent.
While data is a valuable resource, we also need perspective about how young people see themselves and opportunities to change their lives. This comes from listening. Almost always, young people want their views to be heard. Poverty may constrain young voices but it doesn’t need to deny their dreams of going to school, learning a skill, helping their families or leaving the slums.
Most of the young people I met were economically active, usually helping in a family business, while also going to school. Nearly all had completed primary education. Some were in secondary school. A few had one or two years of university education. I posed the same questions to all of them.
“What’s important to you?” The answer was swift. “To be trusted.” “To be respected by my family and community.” And often, “Helping other young people.”
How do you see yourself now? “As the head of household.” “A mother.” “A role model for my younger siblings.” “Owner of my business.” “ A leader.”
Why do you need to earn money? “To help my mother or grandmother.” “To pay for school fees.” “To buy medicine.”
What do you need? “An opportunity to learn.” “A network that gives me ideas and encourages me.” “Information about jobs.” “Skills that make me employable, like learning to use a computer.” “Knowing how to handle money.” “A safe place to save money.” “A mentor.”
Listening to African youth isn’t innovative. It should be where programs start. And, their insights are often surprising. Understanding their motivations for change was just as powerful as understanding their aspirations. I had expected the hopefulness and hunger for knowledge and learning, but was surprised by the powerful motivations to help their families and willingness to make personal sacrifices.
Listening is a powerful act. It’s an act of respect as well as pragmatism for anyone looking to work with young people. We need to confront the realities and desires of people living in poverty from their perspectives and on their terms if we are to be effective enablers of change.
Reeta Roy is president and CEO of The MasterCard Foundation, a private, independent foundation based in Toronto. Its global mandate is to enable people living in poverty, particularly youth, to improve their lives – and the lives of their families and communities – by expanding their access to microfinance and education.
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COMMENTS
BY Boris Bulayev
ON April 1, 2010 05:44 PM
Hi Reeta,
Thanks for this great article. In our work, we hear that in Uganda as much as 50% of the population is 15 and under. So it’s no wonder that this is an incredibly important population and one that will be charged with tackling the problems facing their country.
In the for-profit world, listening to the “customer” is often cited as the key to success and in startups how well you listen and learn from your “customer” will make or break your company (popular product development blogger Eric Ries constantly cites this - http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/). Yet in the non-profit there doesn’t seem to be as much emphasis on listening as a key to success. Metrics and measurement are, but listening and iterating what you do based on that does not get nearly as much attention as it should.
This is particularly risky for non-profits because they don’t have the inherent feedback mechanisms built in - after all the buyer and the user of the product and service are two different groups (buyer is the donor, user is the client). And when dealing with Africa, they are often very far away. So it seems like the non-profit sector is well deserving of a much stronger dialogue on how to better listen and build feedback loops into its products, and how to iterate and adapt based on that. If it’s so key for the for-profit sector, shouldn’t it be just as key for NPO’s?
At Educate!, the organization I’ve ran with my partner since college, we’ve been able to get to where we are, and continue to grow because of our ability to adapt quickly. After running a scholarship program for refugees, we realized that the challenge wasn’t necessarily putting more students into high school, as we were, but making sure that those students come out of high school prepared, both in terms of confidence and knowledge, to tackle their communities greatest problems. This change in direction came about because of many conversations with both experienced advisors as well as students we worked with. And we have never looked back. Many of those advisors joined our advisory board and continue to provide valuable advice.
Our program model continues to evolve and adapt on a weekly basis, as our team discusses what worked and didn’t work the prior week. But the challenge now for us is to institutionalize this to make listening a constant part of the organization and what we do, particularly as we grow to scale. We’re not there yet, but we believe that listening has allowed us to get to where we are and will allow us to get to where we want to be. But we could use all the help and learning from other organizations that we can get, and I sincerely hope that the dialogue around listening for non-profits will continue to build on itself.
Boris Bulayev
President/Co-Founder, Educate!
BY Eric Glustrom
ON April 2, 2010 02:09 AM
Hi Reeta,
Boris forwarded me your article, and I wanted to say thank you for the great thoughts on the importance of listening. The need for listening in social change work is crucial, but can often be overlooked. As Boris said we have a long ways to go, but it is the listening we have done that has allowed Educate! to get off to a good start.
I smiled when I read your post because many of the youth’s answers to your questions – “Helping other young people,” “I see myself as a leader,” and “I need a mentor” – are the same answers we heard while we were designing Educate!’s model of education.
Educate!’s model is focused on unlocking the potential of youth in Uganda to solve their communities’ greatest problems of poverty, disease, and environmental degradation through a social change course, long-term mentoring, and a student-led initiative or business in the community. Everyday we see inspiring changes both within our students and in their communities and I believe this is because our work is inspired by our students themselves.
Educate! began as a scholarship organization in 2002. We provided scholarships with the ultimate goal of helping students to become leaders in their community. In fact the students have since built a pre-primary school in their community, sent over 80 additional students to secondary school, and started a community based organization, COBURWAS, with a yearly budget of over $20,000. When we asked the scholarship students about the role Educate! played in helping them to do such remarkable work in the community, the students said “it was the belief you had in us,” and the “relationships you built with us.” Inspired by their words, we then set out to supplement the education system with exactly what the scholarship students said was so powerful: mentoring and support solving community problems.
In our work today, we have developed systems to listen to our students, but need to do more to develop systems to incorporate those learnings into our programmatic model on a real-time basis. These feedback systems will ultimately allow Educate!’s model of education to continually innovate to fill the evolving needs of our students. Any advice you, or other readers have, about successful listening and feedback systems would be wonderful.
Thank you for your good work and I look forward to reading the conversation.
All the best,
Eric Glustrom
Executive Director/Co-Founder, Educate!
www.experienceeducate.org
BY Kim Wilson
ON April 2, 2010 08:56 AM
Dear Reeta -
Thank you for this article. Like you, I am always surprised when I talk to young people and hear directly from them what they want. In India, when listening to both in-school girls and out-of-school girls for about 20 days in 2007, I was struck by how much they wanted a “place to go” to be with one another. I was there researching how programs in HIV/AIDs, malaria, early pregnancies, etc. might be avoided. What I heard was they did not really want to learn about any of that in a special setting, but wanted a chance to be like their peers, which meant going to school and staying in school. They were pretty much willing to do anything to go to school. To make this happen many were saving with their moms in local savings clubs so that they would have money to buy shoes (they hated not being able to have decent shoes for school and said they were embarrassed to come to class barefoot or with old sandles). Until I listened, as you suggest, I had no idea that standing between them and the education they wanted was a pair of shoes.
Thanks for a beautiful posting,
Kim Wilson
BY Susan Cornell Wilkes
ON April 2, 2010 01:33 PM
Hi, Reeta:
Terrific posting! I was just in Uganda taking a group of women to visit microfinance programs, many involving young people, often heads of households orphaned by HIV/AIDS. I agree with you absolutely.
I hope to see you at the GPF again this year. Will you be at the Nairobi Microcredit Summit? I have clients who will be there plus a colleague, Susan Plimptpn whom you’d enjoy. She was Board Chair of World Learning and has been involved with schools in Northern Uganda.
All the best,
Susan
BY Cynthia G. Hawkins
ON April 2, 2010 06:48 PM
Dear World Community
I am glad for the opportunity to be kept updated and informed from a Global Perspective
Thank you KDSL and Listening is Key to Life…
I’m an American Educator of more than 25 years
and the international perspective seems so removed
from our public schools
and yet I teach military students - most who have traveled in their short lives…
Keep up the efforts - We are evolving as humans…and while the population in America is aging ...the population in Africa is not…the balance of Life
BY Reeta Roy
ON April 6, 2010 07:31 AM
Thanks to all who have commented on my post. I’m moved by your thoughtfulness and by the great work you’re doing in Uganda, in India and in the United States.
Boris and Eric, I’m inspired by Educate!’s model of encouraging feedback – and listening – throughout the life of its scholarship program. We, at The MasterCard Foundation, recently announced a joint scholarship program with Kenya’s Equity Group Foundation. Built into that program is a plan for tracking quantitative and qualitative feedback from participating students, mentors and teachers over time, which will allow us to improve design and delivery. I’ll plan to write on the impact of that feedback over the course of the five-year program, so that we might all better understand the necessity of listening.
Kim, I appreciate that you raised the need for youth living in poverty to have safe places to gather with their peers. School is certainly the ideal environment for these interactions, but we all know that financial and cultural reasons often preclude it as an option. You might be interested to know that, as part of our partnership with BRAC in Uganda, we help fund their network of 500 “girls clubs” across Uganda. There, 15,000 adolescent girls gather to socialize, and to learn life and employment skills. We hope to support more endeavors such as this in the future.
Susan, it’s great to hear from you. I will be at GPF again this year, but I’m afraid I can’t make the Microcredit Summit. I’d love to be connected to your colleagues and clients while in Redwood City.
BY Boris Bulayev
ON April 7, 2010 06:46 AM
Thanks Reeta. I very much look forward to hearing how your scholarship program goes and the feedback you get from it.
I’m also very glad that you fund BRAC in Uganda. Arif Islam has been incredibly helpful to us, and it’s amazing how much impact they’ve created in Uganda in such little time.
All the best,
Boris
BY Eric Glustrom
ON April 9, 2010 02:53 AM
Thank you for you follow-up, Reeta. It will be very interesting to see how the listening you do with the Equity Bank Foundation scholarship students and other constituents enables the model to be improved. I look forward to reading your next post!
We have been in touch with Jeane Mathenge of the Equity Bank Foundation. I sent her Educate!’s social change curriculum, which I believe she and the board were considering incorporating into their work. It would be great to see how adding a version of Educate!’s curriculum to the Equity Bank Foundation scholarship program could increase the positive impact on the students themselves and their communities in both the short and long run.
While in Nairobi a couple weeks ago, I also had the chance to meet with Edwin Macharia and the Dalberg team during a learning lunch, in which I presented Educate!’s long term strategy and the Dalberg team provided advice and feedback over lunch. It was a very informative session, and I really appreciate the opportunity. He mentioned he has worked with The MasterCard Foundation in the past – it is great to see the overlapping connections.
Thank you for all of your good work, and I look forward to being in touch.
Eric