Local Youth Career and Educational Advisor (L.Y.C.E.A)

LYCEA is an adaptive mobile career guidance platform for students anywhere access to qualified career guidance is unavailable.

LYCEA is an AI enabled mobile career guidance platform that can be accessed via SMS,Voice SMS, USSD and web. It is designed for students of all ages anywhere in the world where access to qualified career guidance is unavailable. Our platform uses artificial Intelligence to create and deliver a personalized learning experience to the user based on his or her strengths and weaknesses which will be established through interactive games. It’s also designed to make recommendations to students, parents and teachers by providing periodic insights via SMS & Voice SMS.

We are also especially targeting blind youth with our voice SMS feature.

We aim to disrupt the career guidance space and help millions of young people develop themselves and achieve their full potential. We also hope to bridge the gap between school and industry.

Lycea solves the problem of "interest - career" mismatch and also narrow the educational knowledge - industry skills gap.

Students from an early age show interest in various fields; They also display an aversion towards others and therefore become weak in those areas.

The reaction to this situation by teachers and parents is generally to encourage (and often punish) the student to perform better in these particular subjects.

We believe that, encouraging students to do better is a good thing but not to the point of suppressing their preferences.

To Team LYCEA, this is quite personal. Growing up, we each faced challenges concerning educational and career guidance; we never had any. Even in the University this problem persisted.

I dropped out of college after two years because I realized I had made a very wrong decision about my course of study. This unfortunate situation exists at all levels of education in most parts of the world.

LYCEA is presenting a better, cost effective and more accessible way to shape current and future generations in tandem with the hard work of educators and parents.

Our solution is aimed at primary and secondary school students, also students with disabilities such as blindness or deafness as well as parents, guardians and teachers; especially in deprived communities to help them make the right decisions about their educational career to reach their full potential. We seek to reduce instances of children dropping out of school because of consistent punishment and mocking for not displaying a high aptitude at math, science or English. The solution will be deployed to our target through mobile phones via SMS and USSD.

Uses will be monitored and measured via our back end admin panel. Also, we are going to be working with the Ministry of Education to monitor our impact on the ground and provide quantifiable qualitative insights based on the reality in the field - 7,000 unique users (Primary, Junior high, Secondary/senior high school Students and their parents)

Monitor feedback from app users and constantly update the A.I. database of LYCEA. - Narrow the knowledge - skill gap required to fit in a particular industry.

Produce users (students) who are fit to work in industries of their interest and seamlessly fit in any work environment right after school

Uses will be monitored and measured via our back end admin panel. Also, we are going to be working with the Ministry of Education to monitor our impact on the ground and provide quantifiable qualitative insights based on the reality in the field. - Decreased rate of dropping out at Primary school and high school/ secondary school level.

LYCEA is artificial intelligence based. This kind of technology has up until now remained the stuff of science fiction to many and AI adoption is still in its infancy in our society.

Career/educational guidance and AI are not words one would ordinarily hear in the same sentence around here but we seek to break ground with LYCEA.

Our solution seeks to use cutting edge Artificial Intelligence technology to improve a broken system by targeting people who generally cannot afford smart phones but have access to feature phones and lower end mobile phones. These phones are used to make calls, listen to radio, send and receive SMS messages; we believe we can turn those phones into tools of greater change for the people. Also, by targeting blind youth with our voice SMS service, we address a segment that is oft overlooked.

LYCEA will be deployed via SMS and USSD to under-served communities that do not necessarily have proper access to the internet. LYCEA will be accessed on lower end mobile phones which are very common. As a social enterprise, we seek to receive grants to make this initiative affordable to the users. Users in more affluent geographical areas will be required to pay a very small fee periodically.

We have side ventures which currently provide enough sustenance for our research phase. Our team is very lean.

We plan to build the prototype of our platform and raise funds (through grants and investment) to scale through pilot to full roll out. We also plan to approach the government as well as institutions with corporate social responsibility projects in the education sector (Such as: https://www.tigo.com.gh/conten... ) for support.

his depends heavily on the success of the prototype.

The primary factor limiting Team LYCEA at this time is access to funds which hinders access to the technical skills needed to fully build out the LYCEA prototype.

We are applying to solve to gain access to the community of experts and mentors as well as funding opportunities to build and scale our platform. Once the platform is done we plan to patent it and make it available to anyone in the solve community who has the skills to make it even better and implement at scale because in the end we do not seek to become rich through this; we simply wish to make the world a better place.

We currently do not have any major partnerships.

There are no competitors at this time.