gold Youth Development Agency, represented by CEO Susannah Farr of South Africa, was awarded the first prize of $50 000 at the African Union Innovating Education in Africa Expo 2019, from over 300 applications across Africa.
The event was held by the African Union Commission in collaboration with the Government of the Republic of Botswana and its Partners in Gaborone, Botswana from 20–22 August 2019.
The theme of the expo: “Harnessing the Capacity of ICT to ensure Inclusion, Quality and Impact in Education and Training in Africa” is in line with the Continental Education Strategy for Africa.
Excellent innovations in education which can be scaled to improve delivery, access and management of education in Africa were showcased throughout.
The award aims to raise the visibility of these innovative practices in order to catalyse support for up-scaling, replication and further development.
The innovations were assessed on the credibility of perceived need, relevancy of the solution, market impact, sustainability and potential for mainstreaming.
Susannah Farr shared gold-youth’s commitment in creating a
movement to embed long-term peer role models and mentors into all schools and
communities measuring concrete improvements in social mind-set and behaviour
change, improved educational outcomes and job creation.
“The gold solution involves Facilitator Interns who are
unemployed youth, between the ages of 18 and 26, employed to train and mentor
teenage Peer Educators.
Through these four-year relationships, Peer Educators are taught to model
positive decision-making, strengthen their school work and maximize their
impact on their Peers and communities.
Through a replicable and evidence-based model of youth peer education since
2004, gold-youth has seen sustained ground up community
change, measurably reaching 71 000 young people, in 4 African countries.
Two modes of delivery allow for deep and wide technology supported replication. We go deep through social franchising with community-based partners. We go wide with Government and diverse replicators through a DIY product suite called Peer2Peer.”
We are employing a tech scale strategy in order to effectively grow our solution into Africa. We’ve packaged the best practices of the gold Model into a DIY toolkit for anyone, anywhere to use. Together with top developers we have taken all our tools, curricula, processes, evaluation system and we are building an African engine using a tech stack, as well as open source platforms.”
On winning the award, Susannah Farr shared, “Everything that gold has achieved to date has been simple and powerful because it’s come from young people on the ground… We want to say thank you because this is going to give young people an opportunity to have their voice heard. We want to see young people in Africa living lives with purpose and possibility. We’re going to work very hard and you can hold us accountable!”
goldyouth.org
Peer2Peer Resources: https://gold-enterprises.teachable.com/
