What is the name of your organization?
Asia Initiatives
What is the name of your solution?
Asia Initiatives Learning Cascades
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Crowdsourcing skilled people to up-skill others, incentivized by Social Capital Credits (SoCCs), who redeem SoCCs to improve their own skills
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
New York, NY
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
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What specific problem are you solving?
Girls in underserved communities across India face significant challenges accessing a quality education, including gender discrimination, under-resourced schools, early marriage, and expectations that girls will assist with household chores. It is impossible to overcome these barriers without incentives, a support system, and services like mentorship and tutoring.
What is your solution?
Learning Cascades employs a multistep process to empower and educate women and girls through a program of peer education and social capital credits (SoCCs). Participants tutor younger students earning SoCCs for each tutoring session. SoCCs can be redeemed for after-school lessons on digital and financial literacy, English, additional Maker Lab time, coding and other employable skills, or to cover school fees as needed. Parents can also earn SoCCs for sending their daughters to school, for taking a public oath against child marriage, and for other actions that help their community.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
We support the education of under-served youth, and especially girls, in urban slums and remote villages where the girls and women face extraordinary challenges in getting an education, fulfilling their potential, and climbing out of poverty. We recognize these interlocking problems of poverty, gender discrimination and child marriage. Our methodology of SoCCs incentivizes peer mentoring and educational support, and also improves the social ecosystem to facilitate the opening up of education and career pathways. We listen carefully to the young people we serve, and use games and fun in our SoCCratic dialogues to help them tap into their own creativity, confidence and leadership skills. All SoCC projects are hyperlocal. SoCCratic dialogues result in the creation of SoCC Earning and Redeeming menus. Older children and young adults mentor younger children to earn SoCCs, which can be exchanged for further up-skilling and educational opportunities.
