MIT Solve

Step 2

Our Solution

EmployED

Our solution's stage of development:

Pre-Seed

Our solution:

Guided self-learning with disability-centric resources for employability skills through chat for disabled. Self-learning as an intervention for increasing self-confidence and self-upskilling mindset, impacting the ability to acquire new skills and adapt to work. Disabled, globally, become more confident, skilled, initiate proactively their own inclusion in society and workforce.

Our pitch:

EmployED is a chat based (WhatsApp, WeChat, email + YouTube) guided self-learning for employability for disabled.

Using our user-centered, well-researched SPECIAL methodology, we create disability-centered resources around life skills. (Think example of a communication scenario - a disabled employee and a manager 1:1 check-in at workplace). Our methodology is award winning and well-researched in local context in India (both rural and urban). Our results from 2010 till date show that resources created with our methodology have experienced 95-98% engagement levels in target communities (specific schools), measured on reuse and referrals.

We collect positive user stories of successful disabled around core concepts. We curate the content into short digestible audiobooks, or chat transcripts in bilingual format. (Listeners listen to or readers read English language to help them with fluency, and local language to help them to understand concepts easily.)

We currently share this on chat (WhatsApp, email with YouTube link, email text) on a weekly basis. What we learned in our testing and experiments is a new website or a new mobile app presents friction in usability. Therefore, we decided to leverage apps and email (and even Facebook in some cases) to pilot test our delivery.

The above guided self-learning process is deployed as an intervention for increasing self-confidence and self-upskilling mindset, impacting the ability to acquire new skills and adapt to work. Our initial results show increase in confidence and students asking us to help them in language fluency through bilingual over traditional english and local language separate versions.

Chat as a medium is scalable (or even email subscription) - with local community chat groups. We are developing systems to build pipeline processes to ensure a weekly or a bi-weekly delivery of our resource. Disabled, globally, become more confident, skilled, initiate proactively their own inclusion in society and workforce.

The problem:

"The ability to acquire new skills throughout life, to adapt, and to work flexibly will be of particular importance. So too will be technical, social, and critical thinking skills." We are solving this for disabled. Challenge is lack of:

Language fluency: low English fluency limiting available job opportunities
Localized resources from the Disability lens: While the US has resources, others do not. There is lack of self-learning resources from disability lens (Perkins is picking up this curricula.)
Technology access: Many disabled use email, WhatsApp and facebook, not others. We need new learning delivery formats on these apps.

Why our solution will solve the problem:

We share relevant, localized, disability-lens centered content, leading the disabled to engage with the content atleast 3-4 times (SEM - SPECIAL Research.)

We see high engagement of disabled on chat: 61% use WhatsApp, 28% email, and 11% texting as primary means of communication with friends. (NITTTR - ARISE Impact research in Chandigarh in publishing process). Field visits in Dhaka, Zimbabwe, Spain, Nigera, US also resulted in our greater understanding of WhatsApp, texting and email as delivery channels.

Through our self-learning SPECIAL audiobooks (2010-2013), we saw increase in test scores (21% average), higher confidence and disabled starting to speak in English.

Who recommended you to Solve - or - how did you find Solve?

IIC team referred me to check, talked with Sara Monteabar0

Step 3

Step 4

The technologies we employ:

Consumer-facing software (mobile applications, cloud services)
Management & design approaches
Something so new it doesn’t have a name

Why our solution is unique:

SPECIAL methodology: Disabled user-centered self-learning content creation design and testing process
Leveraging mobile apps which they currently use for informal communication - testing and validating best communication processes for guided self-learning intervention
Innovative curriculum with a focus on income generation and employability: Developing role models through our user stories segments to profile the journeys and successes and failures of disabled individuals: employed, entrepreneurs, artists. Many disabled are artists. We can teach them how to monetize their art or freelancing skills and generate income)
Design Innovation: We are figuring out how to design our content format for learning that feels native to chat.

Why our solution is human-centered:

We created our disabled user-centered design process - SPECIAL.

The core tenets of SPECIAL Methodology are:

User stories for personalization and relatability
Single consolidated bilingual module rather the separate translations
Multiple iterative testing on various parameters:

Pace and pause
Human narrated
Vocabulary
Clarity

(Start at 17th minute https://www.youtube.com/watch?...)

How people will access our solution:

We will actively reach out on chat on daily or once in 2 days, and then on a weekly basis on email.

We use apps and tech (andorid - WhatsApp, gmail, YouTube and other platforms) - what the disabled already use.

We are conducting pilot studies in Dhaka, Chandigarh, Delhi, Spain, Zimbabwe and Nigeria to validate our delivery mechanism/ communication processes and strategies; and develop best practices.

Technology-Readiness Level:

6-8 (Demonstration)

Our website

http://ariseimpact.org/our-work.html

Step 5

Our organization:

Non-Profit

Where we are located:

United States

How we will sustain our team financially:

Current Sources: Awards/Prize monies during the years, bootstrapped, donations

Growth: Grants, Corporate CSR (Dell, Microsoft, Cisco - we are establishing working relationships with Dell EMC, Cisco.)

Future - Value added services - charged to corporates for recruiting / access to disabled employee potential pool.

The factors limiting our success:

Limiting factors include:

1. Adoption of already existing digital apps (and their usability features) in different countries (We are currently testing in India, Bangladesh. Next phase pilots in Zimbabwe, Nigeria, US and Spain (we have local team members here).

2. Ability to continue to get language translations (would need partnership with Duolingo or someone like them)

3. Ability to scale up our team from a current of 30+ people to 50+ people in next 2 years, and then 100+ people

How long we have been working on our solution: