Boris Bulayev, who founded Educate! in 2009 with Eric Glustrom and Angelica Towne, was awarded the CHF100,000 Jacobs Award for Social Engagement (worth over $100,000 US), along with representatives of nine other social entrepreneur organizations last November.
Boris Bulayev receives the award from Lavinia Jacobs, President of the Jacobs Foundation
The Jacobs Foundation was founded in 1988 by the late Klaus Jacobs, an entrepreneur who built both the chocolate manufacturer Barry Callebaut and the global human resources solutions firm Adecco.
The award is given annually to leaders of organizations that focus on children’s learning, development and education – social entrepreneurs who share, in the words of the Jacobs Foundation, “a common wish for social change, and a restless personal social engagement. They are beyond talking – they act.”
Criteria include that the organizations provide solutions for positive child and youth development at low cost, which are sustainable and can be easily implemented on the spot. Another criterion for these local approaches is that they have
Project Redwood awarded grants to Educate! in 2011, 2012 and 2013. The grants were pivotal each year. In 2011, Educate! expanded its reach to 75 students and developed its entrepreneurial curriculum. The 2012 grant supported an additional 125 students and improved their model for scale. In 2013 a two-year course on leadership and entrepreneurship program was implemented in five schools, as well as a mentoring program and a school-sponsored business club.
According to Educate!, in the five years since then, Educate! has expanded to two more countries and increased student reach by 3,575%, intensively impacting more than 44,000 students per year in over 950 schools across Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya.
In the words of Boris Bulayev, “Project Redwood provided us with critical funding and a supportive partnership that allowed us to transition from our start-up phase to
Boris was inspired to found Educate! by his own experience of the value of education. A refugee from Latvia at age seven, he cites his good fortune for attending a good public school in San Francisco and then Amherst College. While there, he met Eric Glustrom, who had had been to Uganda and seen the impact that improved education could have. They saw the huge opportunity to transform classrooms into training grounds for leadership skills and techniques to start small businesses.
Since 2009, Educate! has honed its model of providing education and entrepreneurship skills so that 56% of program graduates start their own businesses; 44% of those
The Awards were presented in a gala evening at the Kraftwerk Innovation Space in Zurich, Switzerland. Awardees and guests were offered drinks in the foyer of this loft-style working space, a former power plant, followed by a welcome from Lavinia Jacobs, Chair of the Jacobs Foundation Board of Trustees.
Upon receiving the award, Boris said “At Educate!, we see education reform as the most cost-effective way to make a large-scale, sustainable impact on millions of young people across Africa. The 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Award will provide us with the incredible opportunity to invest in further learning, testing, and iteration around the question “how do proven solutions integrate into national education systems?” We believe that successfully answering this question has the potential to unlock opportunity for millions of African youth, so continued research and development for our government integration solution is our top priority.”
A documentary film, “Making a Change,” by Swiss director Oliver Paulus preceded the awards ceremony, followed by a chance to meet the awardees in an informal setting.
“Flying dinner” was served from food stalls with specialties from the home countries of the awardees, including “potjiekos” (a traditional African meat dish) bites with
2018 Jacobs Award Winners
Left to right: Lavinia Jacobs, President of the Jacobs Foundation; Lucia Kossarova, BUDDY, Slovakia; Agatha Thapa, Seto Gurans National Child Development Service, Nepal;