The Literacy Future

The public school system in Brazil breeds inequalities, additional to failures, and dropouts the levels of literacy achieved at each level of education are below expectations. School closures due to the Covid-19 crisis are widening inequalities, enhancing the disadvantage of finding employment, and becoming an obstacle to participation in an increasingly technological future. 

Our solution is a virtual classroom that will use AI to offer tailored content for each child, based on their proficiency, age, and education level. This project-based approach allows us to deliver rich, real-world content that transforms the learning process into a dynamic, exciting experience to develop student literacy and STEM skills through a process that is relevant and fun for them.

If scaled globally, our solution could educate 132 million girls who are left out of the school system, fostering literacy, numeracy, and practical training to break the generational cycle of poverty.

Globally, 1 out of 5 people is illiterate, with a further three billion people struggling to read and write at a basic level. Low-level reading and writing skills cost the global economy around US$ 1.3 trillion each year. 

Beyond economic outcomes, illiteracy represents an enormous social cost. Those living with complete or functional illiteracy bear the prospect of poor health outcomes, welfare dependency, lack of social cohesion, a higher level of exposure to crime, and a lack of self-worth. Poor literacy also limits a person’s ability to engage in activities that require either critical thinking or a solid base of numeracy skills. 

Women are often the losers when it comes to worldwide literacy. Around two-thirds of the illiterate population consist of women, studies show that illiteracy is a bigger disadvantage for women than to men, exposing women to higher levels of unemployment, domestic violence, early pregnancy, early marriage, higher maternal mortality, amongst others. 

While the number of illiterate youth declined from 170 million to 115 million, regional and gender disparities persist. In the most recent years for which data are available, young women accounted for 59 percent of the total illiterate youth population.

Source: UNESCO Statistics Global Database, 2019

Our solution is a virtual classroom that will use AI to offer tailored content for each child, based on their proficiency, age, and education level. This project-based approach allows us to deliver rich, real-world content that transforms the learning process into a dynamic, exciting experience to develop student literacy and STEM skills through a process that is relevant and fun for them.

Most solutions tend to work with girls, and young women that are already literate, furthering their skills but, around the world, 132 million girls are out of school, not achieving enough literacy to participate in the job market or to prepare for an increasingly technological future. In countries affected by conflict, girls are more than twice as likely to be out of school.
Therefore, bringing literacy to these girls and young women is the only way of leaving no one behind. 
We believe that our project relates to all dimensions of the Challenge. 

Literacy is a very time consuming one on one process, and it's overwhelmingly difficult to offer tailored content to meet the needs of each student. 

AI algorithms easily adapt to students' individual learning needs and can deliver instruction based on their strengths and weaknesses,  generating a learning path for every student, making it easier for us to monitor and evaluate the results, assess every students' difficulties and collecting data that we will use to improve the platform. 

Most literacy interventions involve building a local team to offer on-site education, making it expensive, time-consuming, and with limited capacity. Our solution makes it easy to scale, generating a "ripple effect" where every educated child can become a trainer, reproducing the effects on their families, friends, neighbours, even entire villages. 

Trough the Empowering Adolescent Girls to Learn and Earn program, Canada Government is investing US$ 9.5 million in Mozambique, to educate 3000 girls, at a US$ 3000 cost per girl in five years. Our solution could educate more girls for only US$ 12 a year, over a two years period. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) can capture, aggregate, and analyze data from several different sources to build a student learning profile.

We will use this profile to offer a personalized learning experience, based on four key approaches: 

· Adaptive learning: technology used to assign human or digital resources to learners based on their unique needs

· Individualized learning: the pace of learning is adjusted to meet the needs of individual students

· Differentiated learning: the approach to learning is adjusted to meet the needs of individual students

· Competency-based learning: learners advance through a learning pathway based on their ability to demonstrate competency, including the application and creation of knowledge along with skills and dispositions.

We currently serve 100 kids with our on-site program. By transitioning to an on-line approach, we believe that we could reach 100.000 users within a year and 5-6 million users in the next five years. 

Within the next year we intend to pilot our solution and reach 100.000 kids in Brazil. We have bold expansion plans over the coming five years, reaching a scale of 5-6 million users in this period. 

First, we intend to scale on Portuguese speaking countries, saving the costs of translating material. Afterward, we plan to offer content on local languages/dialects so every kid can have access to our platform. 

Although we focused on girls and young women for this challenge, we believe that education free of gender norms has direct benefits for boys too. In many countries, norms around masculinity can fuel disengagement from school, child labor, gang violence, and recruitment into armed groups. Expanding our reach to all children and youth out of school, we could have the opportunity to impact 258 million children and youth around the world. 

Capital

Exposure

Distribution

Partnerships

Participating in Challenges such as SOLVE, pitching the idea to investors and potencial partners. 

3 full-time staff

1 part-time developer

I believe that the struggle to enhance inclusion, respect for diversity, resilience, justice, and equality should give us all a sense of purpose, I am passionate about education and I’ve built my career with the understanding that education is a life changing experience. Since 2006 I’m an advocate against functional illiteracy, coordinating and stimulating cultural policies and helping to create a world of engaged readers. As an Executive Director, I have been working actively on fundraising, project management, stewardship, grant writing, board of trustees relationship, team building, volunteers hiring and budget management, among other administrative roles.

I am a creative and critical thinker with strong problem-solving abilities and I am not afraid to work outside my comfort zone and excel when challenged. I am passionate about unconventional ideas and new perspectives and strive to translate vision/ideas into workable solutions and shift course as needed to ensure effective follow- through.

We have bold expansion plans over the coming five years, reaching a scale of 5-6 million users in this period. Besides fund-raising, our pricing is based on a US$ 1 monthly fee, per learner.

Community Centres, Organizations, Schools, Parents Associations will receive significant reductions for scale. 

First, we intend to scale on Portuguese speaking countries, saving the costs of translating material. Afterward, we plan to offer content on local languages/dialects so every kid can have access to our platform. 

Although we focused on girls and young women for this challenge, we believe that education free of gender norms has direct benefits for boys too. In many countries, norms around masculinity can fuel disengagement from school, child labor, gang violence, and recruitment into armed groups. Expanding our reach to all children and youth out of school, we could have the opportunity to impact 258 million children and youth around the world. 

We are passionate about education and innovation, Solve will help us to collaborate with other organizations and grow our international exposure, access to capital, technology developers, and service distribution. 

Many refugees are out of school, not receiving proper education, lacking behind in building skills and our solution could highly beneficiate these beneficiaries. 

Women are often the losers when it comes to worldwide literacy. Around two-thirds of the illiterate population consist of women, studies show that illiteracy is a bigger disadvantage for women than to men, exposing women to higher levels of unemployment, domestic violence, early pregnancy, early marriage, higher maternal mortality, amongst others. 

Our solution could highly beneficiate these beneficiaries.

Women are often the losers when it comes to worldwide literacy. Around two-thirds of the illiterate population consist of women, studies show that illiteracy is a bigger disadvantage for women than to men, exposing women to higher levels of unemployment, domestic violence, early pregnancy, early marriage, higher maternal mortality, amongst others. 

Our solution could highly beneficiate these beneficiaries.

As a Portuguese speaking country, Portugal is number one in our list to scale.