Solution Overview & Team Lead Details

Our Organization

Click+Clack Learning Lab

What is the name of your solution?

La Aldea: a civic multiplatform education universe

Provide a one-line summary of your solution.

La Aldea: A playful multi-platform solution providing equitable access to quality civic education for children in underserved communities in Colombia.

Film your elevator pitch.

What specific problem are you solving?

Access to high-quality civic education and resources is a critical issue that has far-reaching implications for the formation of well-equipped citizens and peace builders in Colombia, a country that is still trying to turn the page from 60 years of internal armed conflict. Civic education is vital for children to understand their rights and responsibilities, actively participate in society, and contribute to their communities. Without access to civic education, children are less likely to develop the skills and knowledge they need to engage in public debate, build a sense of social responsibility, and promote a culture of respect for diversity and human rights. This perpetuates a cycle of poverty and social exclusion that undermines the health and stability of society as a whole.

The scale of the problem in the communities we are working in, and globally, is significant. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, 3 million students dropped out of school in Latin America in 2020, representing a 1.7% decline in enrollment compared to previous years. Since 2015, Colombia has experienced an influx of 5 million Venezuelans either settling in or passing through, adding 455,000 students to the education system, and growing the number of children who are out of school. Moreover, armed conflict has been on the rise since 2020, further weakening schools and increasing child recruitment by illegal armed groups. The Colombian Ombudsman's Office reported that in 2022, there were 140 forced displacements and 15,761 families were put into forced confinement in areas controlled by illegal armed groups, making it impossible for children to attend school. Natural hazards are also on the rise: floods, hurricanes, volcano eruptions have eroded the school system’s capacity, which in some areas gets shut down for months. 

Deep-rooted inequality, corruption, and regional disparity exacerbate the problem of civic education in Latin America. The World Bank reports that Latin America has the most unequal access to education in the world. Colombia´s performance in OECD’s PISA is far below the averages, and educational achievements in SABER test vary greatly across the income distribution; only 56% of households have an internet connection, and 75% of the 0-5 population has no access to care services, exacerbating socioeconomic inequalities. 

Migrants also face significant challenges when it comes to accessing civic education including discrimination and paperwork barriers. A UNHCR report found that 40% of Venezuelan refugee and migrant children in Colombia were out of school in 2020. Many of them are passing through Colombia or moving between different regions within the country, making it difficult to track their educational trajectory and ensure consistent access to civic education and resources. As a result, many migrant children fall behind in their education or miss out on opportunities for civic engagement and community participation.

The lack of access to pertinent education strategies that are flexible enough to breach children in those different contexts and that can enhance teachers and non-formal educators´ skills, training and dynamics makes it difficult for international and government agencies to deploy large-scale civic education solutions. 


What is your solution?

La Aldea is an interactive transmedia educational universe designed to strengthen children's (aged 5 to 14), caregivers', and educators' civic skills by promoting learning and engagement around social and community issues. It is a child-centric, agile, fable universe that serves formal and non-formal educators and learners. The program features a cast of animals representing archetypes of a Latin American society, facing multiple challenges to live together, thus creating metaphors of real-life situations.

These carefully crafted stories and activities allow the exploration of a wide range of civic questions, including power, human rights, justice, xenophobia, migration, elections, and public goods. La Aldea's strategy has proven flexible enough to integrate new themes and cultures into its narratives, allowing it to continuously update and align with the communities it serves.

In addition, La Aldea's characters help children develop a wide range of socioemotional competencies, including emotion recognition, empathy, self-awareness, and relationship skills. La Aldea provokes learning experiences in which children and adults open up conversations about their communities' most pressing issues and think about how to resolve them. La Aldea’s different platforms ensure relevance for different learning styles, including visual, auditory, reading/writing, and kinesthetic. 

La Aldea's transmedia program offers print, radio, TV, games, songs, mobile, and digital content to integrate current civic themes into the mainstream curriculum or interactive materials for out-of-school children and youth in any given context. La Aldea has mostly impacted peripheral territories in urban and rural Colombia where school systems are weak and children's education trajectories are often interrupted by economic distress, migration, natural disasters, or armed conflict.

La Aldea leverages technology to expand its reach, delivering content through chatbots for kids and adults and the use of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) channels, especially with the migrant population. The program is currently exploring ways to make La Aldea more responsive and personalized, developing a mobile-based solution that allows children, educators, and families to interact with its characters and themes through an artificial intelligence-supported platform. This WhatsApp-based strategy enables the program to monitor and gather data of children's surroundings and activities, sensing the right type of conversation and learning that needs to take place and identifying the educational resources required in a specific context.

The program creates civic networks of teachers, families, and children, placing play, inquiry, problem-solving, systemic thinking, imagination, and cooperation at the center of the pedagogical process. La Aldea results in a wide range of civic engagement initiatives, such as waste collection activities, integration gatherings between migrant and host populations, and school protests to show support for community leaders.

To date, La Aldea has reached 4 million radio listeners through large-scale partnerships with radio stations, and impacted 350,000 children and 5,000 teachers and community workers in 25 out of the 32 regions in Colombia.The solution has also been used in Venezuela and Mexico.

LINK: https://laaldea.co/en/home-en/

Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?

La Aldea has reached 350,000 underserved children and families in Colombia who face various challenges in accessing quality education, including those caused by economic distress, migration, natural disasters, and armed conflict. Many of these communities are located in rural or peripheral areas with limited access to resources and infrastructure, leaving children at an educational disadvantage.To address these challenges, La Aldea provides a multi-platform approach that ensures that all children, regardless of their socio-economic background or their school enrollment status, can access quality education. 

In addition to addressing challenges faced by children, La Aldea recognizes the realities of teachers who are often left alone, with  little access to educational materials on civic issues and poor access to connectivity and resources. To address this, the program provides on-site and remote training and the delivery of educational resources on civic issues that enhance their skills and classroom dynamics. As so few resources reach those schools, La Aldea provides a transversal approach that allows it to be included in a wide range of subject areas including language, social sciences, arts and socio-emotional. All of La Aldea's materials are cross-checked with the pedagogical frameworks of the Ministry of Education to ensure that they align with national educational standards, solving the problem of scarce educational resources in these schools.

For children who are in school, La Aldea provides quality educational resources that promote critical thinking, citizenship, and social and emotional learning. The program incorporates a range of learning resources that are designed to engage and inspire students, including digital and analog resources, multimedia content, and experiential learning activities. Through this approach, La Aldea aims to foster a love of learning in children and empower them to become curious, active and engaged citizens.

For children who are out of school, La Aldea provides non-formal educational settings that serve their needs and connect them to real-life dilemmas they would discuss in a classroom setting. To ensure access to education during recurrent school closures, La Aldea can be delivered through distributed physical, digital and audio books, radio and podcast, and through its chatbot, enabling children to continue learning regardless of their location or connectivity, thus reducing the impact of crises on their education.

La Aldea's impact extends beyond the children it serves, as parents feel empowered to support their children's education, while teachers and non-formal educators benefit from access to well-crafted educational strategies that improve their classes and impact. The program is designed to be scalable and can be adapted to different contexts and communities. La Aldea also partners with local and national governments, civil society organizations, and the private sector to expand access to quality civic education. All of this ends up creating a civic network of teachers, families, and children that fosters interrelatedness, empathy, and systemic change in communities.

How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?

A MULTIDISCIPLINARY TEAM: Our team is uniquely positioned to design and deliver the proposed solution to the target population. With over 12 years of experience producing multiplatform educational content, we have gained deep insight into the needs of the communities we serve. Our multidisciplinary team of 50+ people includes teachers, anthropologists, designers, writers, sociologists, and political scientists who have on-the-ground experience with children, teachers and community members. Our content team has the capabilities to produce across different platforms, including games, books, radio, podcasts, videos, and digital resources, with more than 200 materials designed to date to address issues related to citizenship, peacebuilding, climate change, sexuality, and socio-emotional skills, among others.

A STRONG LINK WITH COMMUNITIES: Through our team of educators, we have established a presence in 25 municipalities throughout Colombia and we are able to navigate contexts where educational services are limited and institutional presence is scarce. We also have hired people from different communities we work with and integrated them into our teams, allowing us to gain insights and access to their culture, beliefs, ways of thinking, and organizing themselves. We understand the importance of engaging with the community to understand their needs and develop meaningful solutions. To this end, we have designed a try and test approach for all contents we create, which includes focus groups, spaces for co-creation with community members, and inclusion of their narratives and themes. We also maintain and build didactic workshops that keep a constructive and permanent dialogue with the community, understanding that the participants are the primary knowledgeable of their context, their territory, their dynamics, and experiences.

WE ARE ACCOUNTABLE: The community evaluates our work and materials, setting the tone for the dynamics and strategies of evaluation and monitoring of their own process. During our workshops, participants are provided with ballots on which they describe suggestions, ideas, and points of view that will either be displayed in a physical space collected at the end of the session or deposited in an urn-type device. We have also opened a mobile channel so that they can provide us with valuable insights, opinions and give us examples of how they use the materials we co-produce with them. These ideas are integrated into both the planning and the selection of resources, and their integration into each community is explicit.

WE HAVE A STRONG PARTNER BACKGROUND: We have partnered with government agencies, public institutions, and organizations to build the institutional frameworks and get funding to reach the last mile. We have been implementing UNICEF's national education in emergency strategy since 2020, impacting more than 500 schools, 150.000 children, and 5.000 teachers. We are currently implementing the European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations in 25 municipalities in Colombia, impacting territories facing multiple affectations such as natural disasters, conflict, and migration. We have also partnered with more than 50 organizations, including the International Rescue Committee, The Lego Foundation, Save the Children, Norwegian Refugee Council, World Vision, Fundación Escuela Nueva, the Colombian Ministry of Education…

Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?

Provide access to improved civic action learning in a wide range of contexts: with educator support for classroom-based approaches, and community-building opportunities for out of school, community-based approaches.

In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?

Bogotá

In what country is your solution team headquartered?

  • Colombia

What is your solution’s stage of development?

Growth: An organization with an established product, service, or business model that is rolled out in one or more communities

How many people does your solution currently serve?

360.000

Why are you applying to Solve?

We are applying to Solve because we see this as an opportunity to expand our scope, delivery channels, evaluation methods and impact beyond Colombia, throughout other countries in Latin America. We believe that our strategy for providing high-quality civic education and resources can be adapted and implemented in other countries in the region, and we hope to receive support from Solve in overcoming the technical, financial, cultural, and market barriers that stand in the way.

LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY: We are confident that our solution, La Aldea, has reached the optimal stage of development to seek expert connections, coaching, and strategic advice that Solve grantees receive. Since 2016, we have created a narrative universe consisting of a comprehensive multi-platform strategy to tackle complex educational challenges. We have taken this pedagogical universe to various contexts, including rural and isolated populations, humanitarian settings, and underserved areas in Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico. As we aim to scale our solution, we are now focusing on leveraging technology to create more interactive experiences, harness data to better understand our users and their needs, provide learning support to migrating children through embedded technological devices, and use AI to develop new narratives and tailor customized learning experiences.

ENHANCING M&E: The assessment of our educational content's impact is a challenging task, particularly when dealing with learning and soft skills that are difficult to quantify, particularly in hard-to-reach locations and contexts. Moreover, our current data collection methods may not suffice to capture all insights required to assess the effectiveness of our program and devise plans for improving impact and outcomes for the communities we serve. Collaborating with MIT experts can help us design more effective evaluation frameworks and explore new data collection and analysis techniques such as AI and machine learning to obtain more comprehensive and accurate program evaluations. 

FINDING PATHS TO SUSTAINABILITY: As we aim to expand La Aldea's reach and scope of services, we recognize the need for a sustainable business model that supports our mission to serve underserved communities. To achieve this, we are exploring innovative ways to monetize our transmedia products and educational services, while keeping our commitment to inclusivity and accessibility. By collaborating with MIT and its Solve network, we seek to leverage their expertise in entrepreneurship, social impact, and sustainable business practices to develop a robust and sustainable model. In this way, we can ensure that La Aldea's impact on education in Latin America is not only significant but also sustainable.

BUILDING A LEARNING ECOSYSTEM: We aspire to develop La Aldea as a comprehensive and inclusive learning ecosystem that engages educators, families, and children alike. To achieve this, we aim to leverage emerging technologies, such as social media and mobile applications, in innovative ways. Partnering with MIT and Solve will provide us with access to cutting-edge technological tools and expert guidance, enabling us to optimize program design and implementation, enhance scalability, sustainability, and effectiveness of our initiatives. 

In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?

  • Business Model (e.g. product-market fit, strategy & development)
  • Monitoring & Evaluation (e.g. collecting/using data, measuring impact)
  • Product / Service Distribution (e.g. delivery, logistics, expanding client base)
  • Public Relations (e.g. branding/marketing strategy, social and global media)
  • Technology (e.g. software or hardware, web development/design)

Who is the Team Lead for your solution?

Emmanuel Neisa

More About Your Solution

What makes your solution innovative?

La Aldea's innovative approach to civic education is grounded in its transmedia universe that integrates multiple platforms to engage children, caregivers, and educators in a playful and interactive learning experience. La Aldea's focus on civic education is unique, as it seeks to promote socioemotional competencies, play and systemic thinking, in addition to providing knowledge on civic issues.

La Aldea's solution leverages the power of storytelling and imaginative play to stimulate learning and engagement around civic themes, creating a universe of characters that children can relate to and empathize with. By placing children at the center of the learning experience, La Aldea promotes active participation and self-directed learning, which has been proven to be a more effective and sustainable approach to education. Moreover, La Aldea's solution is scalable and adaptable to different contexts, allowing it to reach underserved communities and address the needs of diverse populations.

La Aldea's strategy of creating a civic network of teachers, families, and children also sets it apart from traditional educational solutions. By fostering interrelatedness and systemic change, La Aldea's solution goes beyond the classroom, creating a culture of social responsibility and civic engagement that can have long-lasting positive impacts on communities. This approach aligns with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals and could potentially catalyze broader positive impacts from others in this space.

La Aldea's solution also addresses the challenges of providing quality education to children in regions where access to resources and infrastructure is limited. By leveraging technology and multimedia platforms, La Aldea ensures that its educational materials are accessible to children with different learning styles, including those who are out of school or affected by school closures and forced confinements due to armed conflict and natural hazards. The program's mobile-based solution, which uses an artificial intelligence-supported platform, allows La Aldea to monitor and gather data on children's surroundings and activities, creating personalized learning experiences that respond to their needs and contexts.

La Aldea's solution has the potential to change the market by challenging the traditional model of education that relies on rote learning and passive consumption of information. By creating a fun, interactive, and multi-dimensional learning experience, La Aldea's solution can disrupt the market and promote innovative educational models that prioritize active participation and critical thinking. Moreover, La Aldea's solution aligns with current global trends that recognize the importance of socioemotional learning and civic education in creating well-equipped citizens and promoting social cohesion. This alignment could lead to increased demand for educational solutions that prioritize these areas, creating a shift in the market towards more innovative and holistic approaches to education.

Overall, La Aldea's innovative approach to civic education sets it apart from traditional educational solutions, and its potential to catalyze broader positive impacts and change the market makes it a promising solution for addressing the challenges of providing quality education to underserved populations.

What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and how will you achieve them?

We envision a future where La Aldea will be recognized as a regional leader in innovative and interactive civic and socio-emotional education, providing children and teachers, including the ones in underserved communities,  with the tools they need to thrive and become active and engaged citizens. We aim at establishing La Aldea as a recognized and trusted pedagogical brand, catalyzing broader positive impacts to education systems in Latin America.

GROWING LA ALDEA’S AUDIENCE: Our impact goals for the next year and the next five years focus on expanding access to high-quality civic education for underserved communities in Latin America. We plan to reach an additional 100,000 children and families in the next year using La Aldea's multi-platform approach, which includes print, TV, games, songs, mobile, and digital content. Our aim for the next five years is to scale our program to reach a total of 1 million children and families in Latin America, including expanding our operations in Mexico, Venezuela, and Ecuador. We will also continue to target the same 4 million listeners we had this year through the next season of the radio program of La Aldea, focused on migration.

LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY: To achieve our growth goals, we are leveraging technology to create more interactive experiences, harness data to better understand our users and their needs, and use AI to develop new narratives and customize learning experiences. In one year, we plan to have our AI-powered WhatsApp responsive platform for teachers, parents and children fully operational and have a first pilot with migrant populations. In five years, we plan to partner with other organizations to create fully immersive educational universes using augmented reality and virtual reality technologies, offering a multiverse of educational experiences that appeal to different learning styles and interests. Our multiverse approach will enable us to provide a more diverse range of learning experiences, beyond traditional learning methods and reach new audiences.

EXPANDING THE PARTNER BASE: La Aldea's scalable model can address education challenges in Latin America and presents a significant market opportunity for expansion through collaboration with governments, cooperation agencies, schools, and parents. We have already partnered with 5 international organizations and government partners and 800 schools that use La Aldea in Colombia. In one year, we aim to double the number of large-scale organizations using La Aldea to massify civic education strategies, not only in Colombia but also in Mexico and Venezuela. In five years, we aim to be the leader of civic education in the region, partnering with government, cooperation agencies, and schools to impact a million children.

WIDENING LA ALDEA’S SCOPE: La Aldea is a universe that can be expanded into many areas, including civic engagement, socioemotional strategies, reading and learning methods, and environmental education. We will innovate and refine our program based on feedback from our users and partners, producing new stories and activities for print, radio, and digital platforms, releasing at least one season of podcasts and radio programs every year, and launching a new TV show focused on early childhood.

Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?

  • 4. Quality Education
  • 10. Reduced Inequalities
  • 13. Climate Action
  • 16. Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions

How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?

La Aldea employs a comprehensive monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework that tracks progress toward our impact goals. Our M&E approach is designed to capture both quantitative and qualitative data that reflects the effectiveness of our solution in addressing the problem of limited access to civic education. To measure our progress towards our impact goals, we use a range of indicators that track our reach, engagement, and impact on students, educators, and families:

  • Number of beneficiaries: We track the number of children, families, and educators who are directly benefiting from La Aldea, including those who have accessed the different platforms and formats of our educational program. 

  • Quality of learning outcomes: We measure the quality of our learning outcomes through pre- and post-assessments, which evaluate children's knowledge, attitudes, and practices around civic topics. This indicator allows us to track the effectiveness of our solution in improving civic skills, such as socio emotional competencies, critical thinking, and conflict resolution. 

  • Engagement levels: We track engagement levels by measuring the amount of time students spend on our digital platforms, the number of activities they complete, and their interactions with La Aldea's characters and stories. This indicator allows us to assess whether our content is resonating with our target audience.

  • Partnerships: We measure the number and quality of partnerships we have established with local and national governments, civil society and international organizations, and the private sector. This indicator helps us track the expansion and effectiveness of our collaborative efforts to improve access to civic education. 

  • Feedback from beneficiaries: We collect feedback from beneficiaries, including children, families, and educators, through surveys, focus groups, and interviews. This feedback provides us with insights into their perceptions of our solution, what is working, and what could be improved.

  • Number and types of content: We track the number and types of content that we produce and co-produce with communities, and that are available on our platforms. This indicator allows us to assess whether we are providing diverse and relevant content that meets the needs of our beneficiaries. 

We also track additional indicators to assess whether our program is reaching a diverse audience, particularly those in deprived areas. These include:

  • Geographic reach: We track the geographic reach of our program, including the number of regions, municipalities, and schools where we have implemented our solution. This allows us to assess whether we are reaching students and educators in deprived and remote areas where access to civic education resources is limited.

  • Socioeconomic status: We track the socioeconomic status of our beneficiaries to ensure that we are reaching children and families from diverse backgrounds and income levels.

  • Gender: We track the gender of our beneficiaries to ensure that we are reaching both boys and girls and promoting gender equity in civic education.

We continuously analyze and assess these indicators to monitor our progress and refine our approach to achieve our impact goals to adjust our strategies and optimize our approach to achieve the greatest impact on the communities we serve.

What is your theory of change?

La Aldea's theory of change is based on the belief that providing high-quality, comprehensive civic education to underserved children and families in Latin America will lead to positive outcomes for individuals, communities, and societies. The program seeks to create an inclusive learning ecosystem that promotes 21st-century skills, critical thinking, social-emotional learning, and civic engagement, using a multi-platform approach that includes print, radio, TV, games, songs, mobile, and digital content.

La Aldea expects that the immediate outputs of its program, such as increased access to educational materials, training for educators and caregivers, and community engagement, will lead to longer-term outcomes, such as improved learning outcomes, increased civic participation, and positive social and environmental impacts. These outcomes, in turn, are expected to contribute to larger-scale impacts, such as reduced poverty and inequality, improved governance, and more resilient communities.

The program's impact is supported by evidence-based research on the importance of comprehensive civic education for individual and societal development, as well as by La Aldea's own evaluation data, which shows positive outcomes for children and families participating in the program. The program also benefits from partnerships with local organizations, schools, and governments, which contribute to its scalability and sustainability.

Describe the core technology that powers your solution.

La Aldea's core technology lies in its multi-platform approach to delivering high-quality civic education to underserved communities in Latin America. The program  leverages various technologies to promote learning, engagement, and interaction including print, radio, TV, games, songs, mobile, and digital platforms. This combination of technologies allows La Aldea to target different groups of people, such as migrants, low-income families, and displaced families.

Reaching teachers and students in areas where access to connectivity and technology is very scarce has been one of the main challenges we have faced. One of the key technologies that La Aldea uses is WhatsApp, which allows the program to reach families and children even in remote areas where internet access may be limited. Through a WhatsApp bot, La Aldea’s characters share audio messages, videos, and other educational content with teachers, families and children, promoting learning and engagement outside the classroom.

La Aldea is currently experimenting with an AI-supported platform to personalize learning and adapt content to the needs and context of individual children. The program leverages machine learning algorithms to gather data on children's context, progress and activities, allowing for better assessment and feedback. We are currently in the trial phase of this back-end system that can analyze the data gathered and tailor the content to the needs of the learners. This will enhance engagement and improve learning outcomes. The program prioritizes making the front-end of the program easy to use and accessible, especially for low-technology and low-internet-connection contexts. 

The training of teachers is done through on-site and digital meetings, WhatsApp messages, and phone calls, using all the available infrastructure to get in touch with them. La Aldea also plans to strengthen its digital resources, including MOOCs, digital libraries.

Which of the following categories best describes your solution?

A new business model or process that relies on technology to be successful

Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:

  • Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
  • Audiovisual Media
  • Big Data
  • Software and Mobile Applications

In which countries do you currently operate?

  • Colombia
  • Mexico
  • Venezuela, RB

In which countries will you be operating within the next year?

  • Ecuador
  • El Salvador
  • Panama
Your Team

What type of organization is your solution team?

For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models

How many people work on your solution team?

55

How long have you been working on your solution?

7 years

What is your approach to incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusivity into your work?

Click+Clack is committed to incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusivity into our work. Our team has been multicultural since its inception, with both founders being French-Colombian. We have also made a conscious effort to hire people from different communities that we work with, allowing us to gain insights and access to their culture, beliefs, ways of thinking, and organizing themselves.

Our diverse and multidisciplinary team of 50+ people includes teachers, anthropologists, designers, writers, sociologists, and political scientists who have on-the-ground experience with children, teachers, and community members. We have also made a conscious effort to work together with Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities, incorporating their views and belief systems into our contents and materials.

La Aldea has methodologies and processes in place that ensure that minorities in communities we work with are listened to and their voices are included in the development of our educational materials. We recognize the importance of creating an environment of equity and inclusion, which includes addressing disparities and striving to eliminate unique and systemic barriers that have prevented the full participation of marginalized groups.

Our organization is also committed to gender diversity, with women making up 70% of our team. We believe that our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion not only makes our organization stronger and more effective but also reflects our values and mission to provide high-quality civic education to underserved communities in Latin America.

Your Business Model & Funding

What is your business model?

La Aldea's business model targets governments and cooperation agencies, schools, and parents to provide high-quality civic education to underserved communities in Latin America. We offer a range of products and services to our beneficiaries, including print materials, TV shows, games, songs, podcasts, digital resources, and on-site and remote teacher training programs. We distribute these products and services through on-site and remote delivery channels that allow us to reach a broad audience across diverse contexts.

La Aldea's sustainability is based on our ability to deliver pertinent, up-to-date content in line with the world's contents and teachings. We have a robust content creation and feedback mechanism that helps us stay up to date with emerging trends and the evolving needs of our audience. Although our success is measured based on social impact rather than profit, we recognize the need for financial sustainability to ensure the long-term potential of our program and to provide equitable access to quality education to all children in the region.

Our business model relies on three income streams:

  1. B2B for government, large non-profits, and multilateral agencies - Our main income stream relies on securing funding from these partners to support the development, production, and distribution of our educational materials and services. We offer operational, logistical, and technological support to deliver educational materials and provide formal and non-formal teacher training, especially in remote, deprived, and peripheral regions. We specialize in large-scale projects for 1,000 or more children, ensuring that final users are not required to pay for our services.

  2. B2B Schools - The B2B Schools model involves a direct partnership with schools, where we provide access to educational materials on a variety of platforms and offer training for their teachers. As part of this model, we are currently developing a subscription service for teachers, which will provide them with a pedagogical tool and training every two months to help them tackle the most pressing issues in their classrooms, such as combating bullying, promoting gender equality, and facilitating difficult conversations around world events. This service will not only provide a valuable resource for teachers, but also generate a consistent stream of income for La Aldea.

  3. B2C Parents and families - We offer a range of products and services that cater to the needs of families, including print materials, digital resources, and interactive games that cover a variety of civic issues and topics related to the world around them. To reach this audience, we plan to leverage a variety of channels, including social media, targeted advertising, and partnerships with distributors, community organizations, and parent groups.

Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?

Organizations (B2B)

What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable?

La Aldea has achieved a level of financial sustainability since becoming Unicef's national education strategy in 2020. However, to further strengthen the financial base of La Aldea and ensure its long-term sustainability, we have identified three key areas to focus on.

Firstly, we plan to strengthen La Aldea's position in public education systems in the region by providing more insightful impact studies. This will allow us to demonstrate the effectiveness of our program to potential government and organization partners, and secure more funding for our work.

Secondly, we aim to develop our reach directly in schools and with families through the consolidation of a commercial strategy. This will involve expanding our subscription service for teachers and exploring new product offerings for families, including print materials and digital resources. By doing so, we can generate a consistent stream of income that can support our work.

Finally, we plan to explore opportunities in the entertainment industry by transforming La Aldea into a film, TV series, or musical project. We have already been in talks with producers from Mexico and the US to bring La Aldea to screens, which will provide another way of developing its universe and expanding our reach.

To support these efforts, we plan to invest in strengthening La Aldea's brand and increasing its market recognition through event sponsoring, targeted marketing strategies, and communications campaigns raising awareness of the brand. By doing so, we aim to generate a strong brand reputation that will attract more partnerships and support for our work.

Share some examples of how your plan to achieve financial sustainability has been successful so far.

Some contracts of La Aldea:

  • 2019 - Gimnasio Vermont School - Distribution of 992 La Aldea’s books + teacher training - 13.000 USD

  • 2019 - UNICEF: Train 160 teachers and distribute educational materials for socio emotional learning and to prevent xenophobia to 7.500 children in La Guajira and Norte de Santander - 86.000 USD

  • 2020 UNICEF - Ensure distance learning strategies for 86.000 children and train 2.000 teachers during the school closures to Covid-19 - 840.000USD

  • 2021 - International Rescue Committee & Lego Foundation: Creation of La Aldea’s radio show to provide socio emotional learning to migrant families in Colombia and Venezuela - 82.000 USD

  • 2021  - UNICEF: Designing and implementing the strategy of return to schools and after Covid-19 with 56.000 students and 1500 teachers in Colombia: 540.000 USD

  • 2021 - Norwegian Refugee Council: Distribution of 500 books of La Aldea for children in conflict-related areas - 2.500 USD

  • 2022 - International Rescue Committee & Lego Foundation: Creation of the 2nd season for La Aldea’s radio show and design of methodologies around play and citizenship -  400.000 USD

Solution Team

 
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