39%
of Uganda's youth aged 18–30 are not in employment, education, or training (NEET), rising to 50.5% among young women vs 29% among young men.
Source: National Planning Authority (2021); Bbaale et al. (2023, 2024), PEP Working Papers
eHub · Applied research & program design · Uganda
We study how out-of-school youth actually get to work. Then we build the pathway that gets them there.
Applied research and program design for young people, women, and refugees excluded from Uganda's formal education and labor systems — delivered through the eHub platform.
55 youth placed to date (Kuwait & Saudi Arabia, 2024–2025)
8 weeks to job-ready vs ~18 months traditional
Founded 2022, Kampala
01 · The problem
The scale of exclusion is structural, not marginal.
43%
of employed Ugandan youth are own-account (self-employed) workers, and more than nine in ten young workers overall are in informal or non-formal employment.
Source: Uganda Bureau of Statistics, Annual Labour Force Survey 2018/19
9+ programs, <0.15% of GDP
Uganda has introduced at least nine distinct youth employment programs since 2008, yet spending on them remains a fraction of the roughly 1% of GDP OECD countries commit to active labour-market programs.
Source: Mabugu & Ronconi (2024), PEP Working Paper 2024-07
02 · The gap
Programs exist. A complete pathway does not.
Uganda is not short of youth employment programs. The Youth Livelihood Programme, the Uganda Women Empowerment Programme, the Presidential Initiative on Skilling the Girl Child, and several others have run for years, and independent reviews find them individually reasonably effective. The same reviews find them collectively disjointed, with no system to coordinate national and local action — and specific, documented weaknesses that shape how eHub and BBOOBBO approaches are designed.
Awareness and targeting gaps
Fieldwork across nine Ugandan districts found many rural youth simply unaware these programs exist, with some programs implicitly favoring urban, better-off, or already-schooled applicants.
Preparation gaps
One-day financial-literacy training has proven inadequate for managing revolving loan funds, contributing to fund misuse independent of participants' intentions.
A population gap
None of Uganda's major existing programs is built specifically around out-of-school young women, refugees, and mothers who dropped out years ago and cannot meet standard eligibility requirements like secondary completion.
Source: Bbaale et al. (2023), PEP WP 2023-16; Bbaale et al. (2024), PEP Policy Brief No. 276
A pathway gap
Existing training pathways for NEET youth take about two years and cost the equivalent of $13,350 (UGX 50M) in lost income. They offer no structured path and no guaranteed route to a job. No approach completes the full journey — assessment, training, certification, and placement — and none is built around how NEET youth actually learn.
This last gap is the one eHub exists to close.
03 · Our reasoning
Why structured skills training and placement mechanisms are key
Local fieldwork and rigorous experimental evidence point to the same design lesson from two different directions.
A. Certification makes training gains last.
A randomized experiment with disadvantaged, out-of-school Ugandan youth compared classroom vocational training against firm-based apprenticeships. Both produced similar skill gains, but apprenticeship gains faded within three years while vocational-training gains persisted — because a completion certificate let workers prove their skills to a new employer after a setback, while apprenticeship-trained workers had no credible way to signal theirs. Vocational training was ultimately more cost-effective at improving labor market outcomes as a result. This is the same logic behind eHub issuing participants a documented, resume-ready skill signal rather than training alone.
Source: Alfonsi et al. (2020), Econometrica, 88(6), 2369–2414
B. Training must be built the way the adult brain actually learns — not as traditional e-learning.
Most training for out-of-school youth is either slow informal apprenticeship or generic e-learning: videos and slides to sit through. Neither is designed around how adults with fragmented schooling encode, retain and transfer a skill. eHub builds on three well-established propositions from cognitive science and neuroscience of learning:
01
Cognitive load
(Sweller, 1988)
Working memory is narrow. Learners with limited prior schooling are overloaded fastest by abstract, front-loaded content. Instruction must be sequenced in small, context-anchored units that respect the limits of working memory.
02
Forgetting and spacing
(Ebbinghaus, 1885)
Without reinforcement most of what is learned is forgotten within days. Retention depends on spaced, repeated retrieval — not on a single long session.
03
Scaffolded discovery
(Bruner, 1960s)
Skills are built when learners actively construct understanding with graduated support, starting from what they already know and do, rather than by receiving finished content.
These are the same principles that make NeLP® work — and the reason eHub adopted it.
04 · The methodology
The methodology: eHub NeLP®
Four learning experiences, each grounded in evidence.
About NeLP®
NeLP® (Neuroscientific Learning Pattern) is a proprietary instructional-design method developed by eWorking S.r.l., an Italian applied-research EdTech company. It designs training starting from the behaviour that must change, not from the content to deliver, and it is founded on measurable cognitive constructs — cognitive load, working memory, spacing effect, testing effect, dual coding — rather than on 'learning styles'. Its reference platform, NeLPx®, is built for non-desk and frontline workers: people who learn on the job, not at a desk.
−30% Time to Competence · +55% Retention Rate
laboratory studies; real-world validation in progress.
Source: eWorking internal research
Adopted by European corporates
NeLP® is the core training engine of Keatrix, the security-awareness platform of Cyberoo, a cybersecurity group listed on Euronext Growth Milan, and is used by corporate academies across manufacturing and retail in Italy.
Best Methodology Award 2026
Ecosistema Formazione Italia (EFI), Innovation Training Summit 2026.
Recognised internationally
Selected among 25 European startups in the UCL EdTech accelerator (University College London / Santander X, 2024); top-10 most innovative EdTech startups, Human Capital category, EdTechX Awards 2024.
01
Generation of knowledge
The learner starts from prior knowledge and real operational context; new understanding is generated, not received.
Evidence: Generation Effect (Slamecka & Graf, 1978); Bruner (1961)
02
Contextualized exemplification
Content is situated in a real operational scenario — a bakery, a care home, a job site — not an abstract rule.
Evidence: Transfer-Appropriate Processing (Morris, Bransford & Franks, 1977); Sweller (1988)
03
Active reworking
The learner decides, acts, and makes errors inside branching scenarios; error is part of the design.
Evidence: Desirable Difficulties (Bjork, 1994); Testing Effect (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006)
04
Quick, spaced, generalizable training and certification
Short sessions sequenced on neuroscientific, not editorial, grounds, so retention holds without re-teaching; ends in a verified, resume-ready credential.
Evidence: Spacing Effect (Ebbinghaus, 1885; Cepeda et al., 2006); Alfonsi et al. (2020)
The learner journey
- 01Sign up
- 02Get assessed
- 03Learn adaptively
- 04Get certified
- 05Get matched
- 06Get placed
One learner, one platform, from first lesson to first paycheck. 8 weeks via eHub vs ~18 months on the traditional path.
“If we build the skills, then youth will be empowered to build the future.”
05 · Team
A team built around the whole pathway.
We have a history of supporting youth empowerment initiatives at community, sub-national and national levels.
Rossette Komuhangi
Founder & Executive Director
Recruitment and workforce-placement experience inside a MoGLSD-registered agency — the same regulatory system eHub's cross-border placements run through today. Computer Science, St. Lawrence University.
Helen Kobusingye
Senior Knowledge and Training Manager
Master Trainer leading soft-skills and communication instruction — the human instructional design at the center of every eHub course. Certified Education and Training Degree, Kabale University.
Alon Muhame
EdTech Researcher & Advisor
Field-experiments and education researcher and startup-ecosystem builder, advising on the AI and data systems behind eHub's adaptive learning engine. Statistics degree; Master's in Quantitative Economics, Data Science, and Pipeline Systems.
Methodology partner · NeLP® methodology by eWorking S.r.l. (Italy) — eworking.it
Work with eHub
Partner with us
We work with funders, employers, and public programs that want a documented, evidence-based route from out-of-school to dignified work. Talk to us about a pilot, a placement partnership, or a research collaboration.
06 · References
The evidence behind the approach.
- 1.Alfonsi, L., Bandiera, O., Bassi, V., Burgess, R., Rasul, I., Sulaiman, M., & Vitali, A. (2020). Tackling Youth Unemployment: Evidence From a Labor Market Experiment in Uganda. Econometrica, 88(6), 2369–2414.
- 2.Bandiera, O., Buehren, N., Burgess, R., Goldstein, M., Gulesci, S., Rasul, I., & Sulaiman, M. (2012, 2020). Empowering Adolescent Girls / Women's Empowerment in Action: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in Uganda. World Bank / BRAC.
- 3.Bbaale, E., Babyenda, P., Kavuma, S., Kiconco, B., Kyamugabwa, A., Sebukeera, H., Nakigudde, C., Wainaina, S., & Mabugu, R. (2023). What Works for Youth Employment in Africa: A Review of Youth Employment Policies and Their Impact in Uganda. PEP Working Paper 2023-16.
- 4.Bbaale, E., Babyenda, P., Kavuma, S., Kiconco, B., Kyamugabwa, A., Sebukeera, H., & Nakigudde, C. (2024). An Empirical Review of Youth Employment Policies and Programmes in Uganda. PEP Policy Brief No. 276.
- 5.Blattman, C., Fiala, N., & Martinez, S. (2014). Generating Skilled Self-Employment in Developing Countries: Experimental Evidence from Uganda. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(2), 697–752.
- 6.Mabugu, R., & Ronconi, L. (2024). The Implementation of Youth Employment Programs in Seven Nations in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Synthesis of Country Studies. PEP Working Paper 2024-07.
- 7.Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS). (2019). Annual Labour Force Survey 2018/19.
- 8.Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285.
- 9.Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). Über das Gedächtnis. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.
- 10.Bruner, J. S. (1961). The act of discovery. Harvard Educational Review, 31, 21–32.
- 11.Morris, C. D., Bransford, J. D., & Franks, J. J. (1977). Levels of processing versus transfer appropriate processing. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(5), 519–533.
- 12.Bjork, R. A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. In J. Metcalfe & A. Shimamura (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing about knowing (pp. 185–205). MIT Press.
- 13.Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
- 14.Slamecka, N. J., & Graf, P. (1978). The generation effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(6), 592–604.
- 15.Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.