Having established that the FAME approach to skills-based education significantly impacts youth when we deliver it to students ourselves, we devoted our energy to exploring how we might make this experience available to more young people.
We began to consider the potential of embedding this approach into the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC). With the evidence of our original in-school model in hand, might governments have any interest in using it to improve the education youths in secondary school receive and the National Youth Service Corps Programme? And if so, could our curriculum improve students’ and graduates’ lives?
The progress here is promising. We learned recently that by stimulating students’ passion for learning and personal development, we can significantly impact their life outcomes and inspire their motivation to succeed in education and career.
NYSC is a mandatory one-year program for recent graduates of tertiary education institutions in Nigeria. They are posted to serve in different parts of the country to work in schools and other institutions. Thus, the NYSC teachers are teachers assigned to the school by NYSC and the Ministry of Education.
This collaboration project trained corpers to serve as role models for students in schools where they have been posted while documenting the process and exploring this impact on the career and educational aspirations of both corpers and students. The RISE project team collaborated with us, to deliver training to corpers and provide support to corpers to train students in public secondary schools. Corpers’ training focused on their motivation to serve as role models, change-makers, and personal educational and career development while students trained by the trained corpers sought to inspire them towards more outstanding commitment towards academic and career development.
We believe that secondary school offers the most cost-effective way for youth to learn leadership values and practice the skills that they will need to thrive in life after school. For over half a decade, we’ve partnered with government institutions to deliver skills-based learning opportunities into State education systems — all in an effort to improve outcomes for young people at scale.
Exposing senior secondary school students who are at the stage of transitioning to higher education to role models in their environment has a positive impact on their aspirations and attitudinal and behavioral patterns. The findings and experiences from the RISE Fellowship Project study confirm the FAME role model approach could greatly contribute to improving students’ motivation and ultimately, their performance and progression in both education and career.
Findings also confirmed that the systems-change approach of corpers’ facilitating the FAME curriculum in secondary schools contributed to building the leadership capacity of the students and fostered cooperation and positive citizenship among students while facilitating the process of improving the learning outcomes of students.
The results are an exciting confirmation of our systems-change approach to improving the quality of secondary education in Nigeria and Africa.
With this encouraging evidence in hand, we are eager to deepen and expand our partnerships to support more state governments to achieve our shared goals of better-preparing youth for life after school.
