Now in its sixth year, the Leadership and Entrepreneurship Incubator (LEI) program has enabled over 800 students to gain valuable skills including income generation, job readiness, and personal development.
The strength of a program can only truly be measured by the impact it has on its participants. At the last LEI East African Summit we had corporate sponsors who ask for our alumni as interns. Major national personalities invited to the event, acknowledged these youth as the future change makers of East Africa.
Year over year we have witnesses the successes of our LEI Participants. 2015 was no exception: 4 youths assisted their parents with new businesses start-ups, 12 more who started their own small income generating activities, and even 1 youth led radio program. This past year, we also had Alumni youth who saved for 9 months to pay for their siblings to attend LEI, because they believe in the program. The stories from our participants are inspiring! LEI participants’ remarkable accomplishment is AAF’s driving force to invest in this program. We know we have something unique.
Stories from the field are always amazing. To help back up these stories and as part of AAF‘s commitment to transparency and accountability 2016 will focus on demonstrating measurable impact around our programs, with particular emphasis on LEI. To ensure that we are using your donation dollars to their full extent we are reviewing all program outcome data, participant surveys, and community leader surveys. Based on those findings by our Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) consultants, both in East Africa and in the USA, we are reviewing existing programs and developing additional program offerings.
Our commitment to demonstrate impact was facilitated by automating the data collection process. Our mobile platform initiative was piloted at our East Africa LEI summit, where we demonstrated a 8 times efficiency over the previous year’s methods with 90% accuracy. The process was transformational! Our mobile platform offers real time data collection, analysis and salesforce.com platform integration. Currently our Kenya and Tanzania teams with the help of our M&E consultants are “validating our digital pilot process” by analyzing data on exactly how our programs are positively influencing the lives of our students, teachers, schools and communities. With the help of our strategic funding partners, we will also have mobile based technology available to our Kenya and Tanzania field staff. The roll out date is scheduled for third quarter of 2016.
We know LEI is transformational for the youth, teachers, families and communities. Now we will have the quantifiable data to support the qualitative data, at our fingertips.
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