Yo Emprendedor

Costa Rica has one of the best public educational systems in Latin America. Nevertheless, it was designed for the 20th century. Our population lacks the essential skill to develop entrepreneurial thinking and our educational system discourages entrepreneurship. We have infinite potential but our fear, lack of risk taking & complacency mindset preached in today’s schools will not let us fully show our potential to the world. 

We propose to scale our methodology to incentivize entrepreneurs in rural high schools. We need to future-proof our countries by incentivizing more creative problem solvers. We propose to scale our teacher training and continue further developing educational content for 13-18 students from rural areas.

We believe entrepreneurship is the most transformative force in the world. If we democratize entrepreneurial thinking and teacher training in spanish for Costa Rica, it will scale to all countries in Latin America. Let's spark this new generation of entrepreneurs.

We are working building a public-private alliance with the Minister of Public Education to continue training teachers in entrepreneurial thinking, scale a teacher-training model, activate with students on site and develop more digital content for our implementation in 135 rural schools during the second semester of 2020. Here, 11,000 students will get trained practicing the essential abilities to cultivate future entrepreneurs. All our tools are implemented in Spanish and can scale to all rural high schools in Latin America. 

Our pilot is with these 11,000 students, but are working to scale and implement to all the +4000 high schools in the country. Our next step is profesional colleges with +80,000 students, and eventually traditional high schools with +850,000 students nationwide.

Costa Rica is one of the most risk averse populations in Latin America. Our educational system doesn't teach us to be smart creatives and problem solvers.With all our potential as a nation, we still lack the skills to take advantage of exponential times. We drastically need to change our mindset if we want to survive & thrive in the future that’s ahead. Fuel our program to serve as a pilot of content in spanish for all Latin America.

We have been training teachers and building curriculum to create our curriculum guides for Entrepreneurial Thinking. We have tested our methodology and content with 10 different rural schools in the country and the feedback has been phenomenal. We understand the situations on site as we have been there working, using human centered design and other design thinking methodologies, to understand what tools we need to give our teachers to make this happen. We have talked, interviewed, teached hundreds of students from these schools to understand how to implement our guides. The spark of projects inside the schools have shown good results and the teachers are motivated to implement our guides. 

There is little economic opportunity in the communities we serve but the potential is impressive. Our guides are implemented aside a social-productive project build by class. We have seen schools start producing chickens to self-serve their whole communities, planting trees and selling their wood to preserve local music instruments, creating dozens of touristic experiences that bring well being to their communities among other enterprises. 

We are training teacher to incentivize entrepreneurship. We are sparking action and unleashing creative power in communities that have been abandoned economically. We are helping people realize they have all the resources they need to start creating change. We have covered 100% of teachers from 10 out of 135 schools with training in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial thinking and how-to-teach-entrepreneurship methodologies.We have been doing our teacher trainings on-site at 10 locations and one 3-day seminar in San José for all teachers and administrative personnel. 

We are working alongside universities and private schools to create a teacher-training-teacher model to scale up and reach the +4000 schools in the country. We have created digital content with the top teacher from the best private schools to share knowledge with all the teacher in public education. We want to continue testing digital content to scale our entrepreneurship certification. We firmly believe these has to be nation-wide and no one should be left behind. We want to continue sharing knowledge, connecting teachers and sparking all students to really create the change in mindset our country desperately needs.