Braiv

At Braiv, we are committed to address the lack of education and mentoring that marginalised young girls experience between the age of 7 and 10.

Our solution is focused on widening access and participation to experiential learning for girls in Europe, Africa and Asia - first-phase through social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and second-phase through our own website and mobile app.

At a global scale, Braiv has the potential to impact millions of girls' lives. By subscribing, the girls would benefit both from our inspiring content created and delivered by globally recognised women and from the skills they would build while solving the challenges set by our guest lecturers.

The content and challenges will be personalised for each girl, to ensure that they acquire the most useful skills and knowledge for their self-development and career aspirations.

2.1 billion girls and women today live in countries that won’t achieve their gender equality targets by 2030, at the current pace. At the same time, 800 million girls worldwide have been displaced from school due to the COVID-19 spread, leaving a significant portion of them vulnerable to abuse and contamination. The Malala Foundation estimates that at least 10 million girls will never return to school, past the pandemic.

Adding to these factors, is the lack of equitable representation of women in positions of power. Although Western countries like the UK are encouraging gender diversity through governmental policies, there are very few digital communication channels built between adult female role models and young girls, and almost none focused on skills-building.

Finally there is an acute lack of personalisation and digitalisation within education globally. Even in developed countries like the US - only 4% of education is digitalised.

Braiv addresses these 4 issues (access to education, female representation, digitalisation and personalisation) and offers a holistic solution.

Right now, Braiv uses social media channels to stream video content featuring female professionals from fields like marketing, law, tech, HR etc and inspires young girls aged 7-10 globally to dream big. 

The videos are fun, 2-3 minute productions which answer questions received from girls and their mothers such as 'what is puberty', ‘what is the power of kindness’, 'how to become a lawyer', 'how to build resilience' etc.

Every week, one of the speakers launches a challenge and the girls have 1-2 weeks to solve it. Challenge examples are 'Build a vision board for next year', 'Send a friend a positive message’ etc.

The vision for Braiv is to build an app that allows girls to track their progress, as well as receive personalised content suggestions. Once this is achieved in the UK market, the global scaling process will begin.

The unique value-add of Braiv is the combination of inspiration, mentoring, community and skill-building, which helps girls empower themselves and others.

Braiv exists to help marginalised 7-10 year old girls all over the world to gain access to education and mentoring online and in engaging formats.

In the first stage, the audience segment we are focusing on are girls from the UK who are inter-sectionally diverse regarding race, socio-economic background and disability.

Recent research by InterLaw shows that the more 'diverse' a girl is, the more discriminated against she will be in the workforce. 

Braiv aims to attract young females from African, Asian & European descent to the platform and expose them to accomplished females from similar heritage, to inspire them to envision and pursue a brighter future for themselves.

There are currently 600,000 5-9 year old girls in the UK on free school meals (an indicator of poverty), whose needs we are learning about in our online community.

Alongside them, Braiv is also addressing middle and upper middle class girls of the same age, with the intent of building a sense of community amongst young girls online regardless of their heritage and inspiring them to understand and support each other.

Braiv is addressing the first dimension, which is increasing the number of girls and young women participating in formal and informal learning and training.

By inviting accomplished female lecturers in front of a diverse young-girl-audience, we aim to reconcile the access gap to quality education and offer a solution for informal knowledge-sharing, right where the audience is. 

Social media platforms are widely used even by young girls from lower incomes and the informal, entertaining format we chose will help us engage and retain the girls who need education access the most.

We are positioning Braiv at the intersection between online teaching, mentoring and self-development, as our solution encompasses elements from all 3 areas.

The most innovative aspect of our platform lies in combining knowledge-sharing with practical skill-building exercises, to ensure that our audience achieve tangible learning outcomes.

We are also proud of connecting female role models with a mixed community of middle class and under-privileged young girls, to instil a sense of unity and mutual support.

These are features not seen amongst our competitors, as many of them target either the upper-middle class market (selling premium education) or the under-privileged audience (offering charitable support). Rebel Girls, Big Life Journals, Khan Academy and Care International UK are such examples.

Braiv currently relies only on Facebook and Instagram to serve our audience and reach new followers, but in phase 2 we plan to build a mobile application powered by Big Data & AI.

This will help us analyse our audiences' preferences, recommend personalised content to them and help them track their own progress.

AI & Big Data are currently being used by most software companies, from Google and Uber to Udemy, Airbnb and more.

These technologies help these brands to better understand their customers and be able to predict needs and desires before they are even expressed. 

We believe that these 2 technologies have the power to revolutionise education, which is why they are core features of Braiv 2.0.

We envision Braiv becoming one of the go-to platforms for young girls worldwide seeking self-development in the next 5 years.

We aim to produce content in 20+ languages and impact over 5 million lives. Through replication (girls teaching other girls what they learnt from us), we hope to impact over 50 million women and girls in the next 10 years.

These ambitious goals will be achieved through a combination of increased activity at Braiv (more speakers, more videos, more challenges) as well as an increase in reach by forming strategic partnerships with other organisations, the media and local influencers.

Braiv currently serves 200 girls.

The goal is to grow to 20,000 in one year and 5 million+ in the next 5 years.

The main barriers that Braiv faces right now are financial. We need funding to build a team and create the Braiv app.

Also, a secondary challenge is our reduced understanding of how to enter new markets while scaling up. Particular attention needs to be paid to cultural sensitivities.

We aim to solve the financial obstacle by applying for grants but also by monetising our service early on. We envision a subscription-based business model, which will be heavily subsidised for our users from low incomes.

Regarding the cultural barriers, no doubt we need to educate ourselves - both through individual research and by taking on courses from accredited instructors.