SpunkGo - Social Media for Good

The paradigm of education is fast evolving out of traditional classrooms to digital delivery to wider audiences. This change represent an opportunity to deliver different learning concepts much faster , more equitablly and with wider reach than ever before.  

Across developing nations, there are young women who are willing to work hard and are motivated to take initiative, but often lack direction as they may be the first one to get educated in their family , haven’t had the required exposure , come from impoverished backgrounds or come from male dominated societies. With the right support, these young women could change their life, circumstances and empower themselves.

SpunkGo is a platform that connects such young women to successful women via free LifeSkill webinars delivered via live stream (or recording to be viewed thereafter). The viewers hear from the speakers on their field of specialization ( lawyers , IT professionals , educators , philanthropists etc.) and have the opportunity to ask questions and interact with these speaker. Currently SpunkGo operates in 20 countries entirely via volunteers and have over 5000+ members. It aims to bring to young women an ability to interact with women professionals and entrepreneurs, who under normal circumstances they would not have an opportunity to interact with. All these young women need is the ability to access the internet from their towns and villages. These webinars give them tremendous exposure and widens their horizons, which often is the only catalyst required to motivate these young women to positively impact their lives.

We have two specific projects within SpunkGo we want to implement. One is to cater to young women in Afghanistan where young women could log into webinars via a browser solution that provides anonymity and leave no trace , aimed at providing young women access to education from the safety of their home. The other is to build a SpunkBox ( solar powered digital classroom/lab ) where young women refugees in the  Dzaleka camp in Malawi could access educational material and webinars. This is proposed to be implemented via a partnership with Dzaleka Youth in Action.

The feedback from the overall SpunkGo program run across the last 1 year has been very positive and SpunkGo has grown to become a small and growing young women’s global community. With the right support we have the opportunity to multifold scale this initiative to providing equitable and relevant learning to communities who can be most impacted positively with such intervention.

View the platform on www.SpunkGo.com. Give us a chance to become bigger and use social media to do good. 

The general problem being solved here is a combination of poverty and lack of educational opportunity for  young women in marginalized communities across the developing world. 9.2% percentage of the world ( 698m people. Source World Bank) lives in poverty and this translates into at over 100m young women across the world who need support and a catalyst  to positively impact their situation. According to GlobalCitizen ( www.globalcitizen.org) ,with access to quality education, a country can raise  its GDP by 23 %.

By providing free , easy to access , relevant learning in this equitable manner, there is an opportunity to make a tremendous change to young women in these communities.

The two specific problems we aim to solve are related to the challenging circumstances related to accessing educational opportunities for some young women in Afghanistan and another related to access to education for young women refugees in a camp in Malawi ( whilst they have lived all their life in Malawi , because they are refugees their access to higher education is limited ).  If successful , this could solve for providing safe education to young women in various other similar refugee colonies across the world.

The overall wider solution involves providing exposure to such young women at the right stage of their life cycle with an aim to help themselves transform their lives positively. This exposure is provided via LifeSkill webinars by established women professionals. These webinars can be accessed for FREE via the internet ( live via Zoom or as a recording on UTube). It is a low tech solution but with tremendous impact. We introduced recordings after members in developing nations gave feedback that they don't have on demand internet access and hence need to view these webinars when they have access.

The solution is simple but very effective. It also changes how learning is provided and in an equitable manner. Any young women with access to an internet connection, anywhere in the world , can get the same quality of useful and relevant learning as was till now the privileged of a few.

The technology solution for Afghanistan will involve a web browser for use by young women from mobile phones which auto uses VPN , deletes history after use , makes the user untraceable , has chat on anonymous mode , ability to receive notifications , attend zoom webinars and Pashto translate built in. It will not be an app or anything that requires download or leaves a user trace.

In Malawi we propose to create a pilot solar powered digital classrooms ( called SpunkBox ) in a refugee camp where students can attend virtual sessions. The idea behind the Malawi concept is to have volunteers add content to a digital classroom library that can later be accessed at a solar powered digital education lab established in a refugee colony where young women can access the lab in a safe manner ( personal safety is a key consideration especially for young women in these camps) and without worrying about continuous electricity or paying for WiFi/internet access. This solution has been used by another organization for school children in Uganda.

The target population for this solution is young women age 15-30 who live and work in developing nations usually in rural and semi rural settings. We have found our solution most impactful in Africa. The need is basic exposure to widen the horizon of these women and once that is provided via streaming LifeSkill webinars, these women tend to group themselves and work to positively impact their lives often from a situation of being helpless. Apart from attending webinars, we also have our members host these and that gives them tremendous confidence.

We believe providing equitable learning to all will translate into a more equitable world and in turn help empower women and reduce poverty.

Our focus in Afghanistan is to manage the specific challenges for women in that region. Similar in Malawi for the refugee population in the Dzaleka camp ( the refugees are mainly from Rwanda and Burundi ). 

The challenge we are trying to address is to empower young women who live in impoverished conditions in developing nations with little hope to better their lives. These young women once provided exposure, direction and confidence, are able to themselves chance their lives. This is provided by linking them to established women professionals who give both direction and inspiration to such young women. We do this using free to access LifeSkill webinars. The only requirement for these women is access to the internet. The model is highly scalable as one can via the same session reach as large an audience as once can.

We started as a 3 country operation ( UAE , Kenya and Kazakhstan ) and in 12 months grew our membership to 5000+ and have 20 country locations we operate in. Hence we believe we are semi established at this stage, have the requisite partnerships, getting support from the likes of speakers who have exposure to the UN, Miscosoft , Cisco , WWF etc., have a few useful partnerships ( KeyNote Speakers) and are poised to grow further. Our desire is to move from 5000+ members to 100,000+ worldwide and cover more geographies in the medium term.

With appropriate focus and support, this platform can be leveraged to provide relevant learning to millions of young women in a way it has never been done before. 

The model is built off the growth of platform like Zoom post pandemic. It is innovative in terms of using very little new technology to link young women who need LifeSkills to volunteers who are happy to provide this, and yet with huge impact. The platform uses Zoom for webinars , Utube for recordings and What's App to communicate and has meshed these together in a way that it has great positive impact to the challenge being addressed. The innovation is in the way the solution has been put together and implemented.

The model scaled up within a year from 3 countries to one in 20 countries and 5000+ members. The innovation in packing and delivering this learning format is where its appeal and scalability lies. Social media has been harnessed to provide an equitable "classroom" for a section of the world population who most need this.

The technology solution for Afghanistan will be unique is that there is no such tailor made solution to manage the specific challenges of this geography. Similarly the use of digital learning labs for young women in refugee camps will be relatively innovative too. We learned of this from an organization using this in Uganda for school children ( www.simbifoundation.org )

It currently serves 5000+ members and we envisage it will scale to serve 100,000+ members in 5 years time. Because of its scalability, with the right support this could even reach larger audiences in the millions.

We have a roadmap which has milestones by year on number of members and locations globally. We will keep measuring ourselves against this KPI. We know our impact at solving the challenge of poverty/women's empowerment is a direct result of our reach and spread. The more global we go, the larger our membership , the more we will be contributing to making an equitable world.

We have 30 global student ambassadors across 20 countries. These young women become the organization SpunkGo and operate all aspects of the platform. Apart from this we have external assistance via a partnership with KeyNoteSpeakers and have a roster of volunteer speakers from different parts of the world.

We have a motivated team of Ambassadors , ability to gain members via social media and a pool of volunteer speakers via a partnership with the worlds largest speaker forum called KeyNote Speakers. We constantly get feedback ( typically on what's app via our groups) from our members. They tend to be an extended arm of the core organization. SpunkGo is in essence a collective of young women working together to better their collective lot.

We have both Ambassadors and members from 20 countries worldwide and represent tremendous diversity in terms of ethnicity , backgrounds , economic status , skill sets and we make all this diversity work positively for the betterment of SpunkGo. See the faces of our members on our landing page www.spunkgo.com and the diverse nature of the team will automatically become evident. We no nothing specific to promote diversity, it just comes by the nature of our organization being global. Our speakers come from an equally diverse background.

We believe that being considered for MIT Solve will give us increased credibility. This in turn will help us get corporate funding , membership and help obtain support to provide on demand internet in certain African countries for young women. Our organization has a great operating model , tremendous appeal and what what is lacks at this stage is credibility at a global stage. It will be a honor and help for SpunkGo to gain credibility by being considered under MIT Solve. In the absence of credibility , in some quarters , we can be considered as a small school project by young women which we are far from being !

We believe we can also benefit from organization support to focus our social media efforts more effectively and MIT Solve may help us partner with the appropriate resources for this. 

Specifically we hope to be able to leverage the resources of The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) for educational content for the digital lab in Malawi and a mobile/technology provider who can assist provide the safety/privacy solution we seek for young women participants from Afghanistan and Malawi.

SpunkGo's model relies on organic growth via social media . This generates membership , speakers , sponsorship etc. Hence mastering the art of communication is critical to success and a lot of our organizational focus is in this area. Increased assistance for our Ambassadors will help the organization blossom and grow rapidly. We also believe we have the need for better data analytics to target our growth more effectively on social media.

The 4 areas of connectivity that will greatly help us is :

- Being introduced to the social impact team in Facebook so they could assist us with analytics for social media targeting of our audiences in developing countries. The focus will be both the Facebook and Instagram teams

- The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) where we could be appointed a mentor for 6 months to help us grow our organization. We would be delighted to have speakers from SHASS faculty on our webinars - it will be a out of the world opportunity for our young women. Additional we hope this we’ll help create content for the proposed digital lab in Malawi.

- The Mastercard Foundation in the United States as they could help us hasten a partnership in EastAfrica with the Mastercard Foundation

- Link us with a technology provider who can help create a solution where young women in Afghanistan can attend our webinars with the safety and privacy of their homes without being tracked via IP etc. We would use the same to build a digital lab for use in refugee camps too.

In Malawi there is the Dzaleka refugee camp consisting of refugees from Burundi and Rwanda . We have recently started a focus on education via webinars for young working with the Dzaleka Youth in Action organization. One of the enterprising young women refugee in the camp Divine Irazoke has been appointed as our Ambassador in Malawi and she is also our webinar speaker in August. We plan to have a special focus on these refugee camps as part of our Malawi expansion and any monies we will , will be used in this effort. The money will be spent building a technology solution for building an educational library and to construct a safe physical solar powered digital lab in a refugee camp in Malawi called SpunkBox. This will part solve for the issue of young refugee women not getting any education schooling in Malawi due to their refugee status. Recently the government has asked for all refugees to return to the camp which makes the issue for these young women more hopeless. 

Our core objective is aligned to the objective of the award, which is to advance the needs of women and girls using technology. We believe we would use the funding for social media and further increase our membership base in the 20 countries we operate in currently. In specific given our greatest challenge to solution delivery is the lack of on demand internet and we are in discussion with some mobile operators in Africa, a Vodaphone Foundation award should help our cause tremendously from a credibility perspective with other mobile operators. We would also use the prize to build a solution for the young women in Afghanistan whereby they can attend webinars with safety and privacy .