A Launchpad to Scale: Amala’s Strategic Plan 2021-2024
“Amala opened my eyes and has given me the ideas, skills and knowledge to start solving the problems in my community” - Amala Alumnus
We are excited about the launch of Amala’s Strategic Plan from 2021-2024, which has now been approved by the Amala Board of Trustees. The strategic plan sets out our goal of creating a launchpad to scale our impact over the next three years.
Over 80 million people are living in forced displacement worldwide, equating to over 1% of the world’s population being displaced. As fewer than one in three refugee adolescents are accessing secondary education, and only 3% going on to higher education, this presents not only a crisis of displacement, but also a crisis of education.
Amala was established in 2017 with the bold aim to provide transformative educational programmes to refugee and crisis-affected youth, who often face insurmountable obstacles to accessing education. An Amala education enables young people to improve their own lives, participate in society and drive wider societal change.
Between 2017 and 2021, Amala developed the first international high school diploma intentionally designed for and in partnership with young people with experience of displacement. We have engaged with more than 500 youth through Changemaker Courses and have developed our model for delivering high-quality learning in low-resource environments.
Our educational model, which focuses on the development of agency to enable refugee youth to transform their lives, community and societies is, we believe, unique and has proven to be in high demand among the young people with whom we have worked. We have increasing qualitative and quantitative evidence of the positive impact of Amala learning, and in the next stage, we seek to build on this success in order to meet the size of the problem we seek to address.
Our ambition with this strategic plan is therefore to significantly grow the numbers of young people we are able to serve, develop organisational readiness and remove barriers to scale in order to create a launchpad for exponential growth and impact from 2024 and beyond.
To do this, we will focus on three strategic aims:
1. Make Amala’s education programmes replicable
Amala’s education programmes focus on developing students’ agency and ability to participate in society. In this strategic period, our focus will be on streamlining and ensuring our model is both simple and cheap enough to be replicated by partners without compromising quality.
2. Become a widely-recognised education provider
In order to build a platform to scale, Amala needs to be widely regarded as a trusted provider of high quality education. We will work with governments, accrediting bodies and partners to obtain formal recognition and raise our profile in order to offer the programme to even more young people in the future and enable Amala students to access a wide range of pathways after graduating.
3. Build organisational capacity to accelerate growth
In the next three years, we will increase our reach tenfold to reach 5,000 students and create a launchpad for exponential growth beyond this strategic period. We will therefore focus on building fundraising capacity and financial sustainability, creating a diverse and resilient network of partners and developing organisational capacity for scale from 2024.
As we embark on this critical next stage of our journey, we are inspired by our students who exemplify the energy and motivation to learn, thrive and lead. We are looking forward to making this plan a reality and to working towards addressing the huge need for quality education among refugee and crisis-affected youth.
“Amala has shown me the other side of education that is learning/working for not just ourselves but also for those around us and the future generations.” - Amala Alumnus
Our goals for this period are ambitious and exciting. This strategy sets out three key goals that will act as a compass for the three years to come, leading us towards programmes that can be scaled, an offer that is recognised and highly regarded, and an infrastructure that can enable exponential growth beyond this period.
This is our route to scale and the next step on our journey towards ensuring that Amala programmes are available to any young person in our target group who wants to access them. We invite you on this journey to create a launchpad for scale and impact the lives of many young refugees and crisis-affected youth.
