Pathways

Building individual capabilities through competency based learning and training programs.

Each year, millions of individuals are victimized by belonging to neglected environments, sometimes by design. They are forced to contend with the realities of hopelessness, un-employability, and other pressures, which can result to extremes such as forced migration in search for greener pastures as with many sub-Saharan African youths, or gang affiliation as an outlet from poverty as with inner city minority children in the United States. Therefore, an intervention that can intercept undeserved individuals at life’s crossroads and prepare them with basic multi-sector competencies to explore diverse personal and professional development pathways is needed. Using Project Based Learning, Movaar has designed a Skills Formation Program that builds individual capabilities for higher education, workforce, and business development readiness in an engaging, fun, and useful way. 

The problem we are trying to solve stems from the schools and quality of the graduates being produced. At schools, the content is often not relatable; teachers poorly paid and trained; access to equipment and resources are limited to non-existent; furthermore in most cases, the systemic design of the whole experience is outright bizarre e.g. in The Gambia, students have only three years of high school education to complete a four-year syllabus. These systems are designed for the students to fail and the value placed on educational enhancement programs and workplace exposure is negligible. Even entrepreneurship as a form of income generating activity seldom succeeds in helping students manage their limited post PreK – 12 prospects, given the extensive scope of these systemic challenges.  

Our Skills Formation Program (SFP) increases the academic prospects, employability, and value of individuals by providing them with access to desirable formal and informal sector market skills through innovative real, and digital platforms, but most importantly, with access to a community. The SFP develops the 'critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving' soft skills of individuals through a Project-based Learning curriculum that integrates proven coaching techniques. These include one-on-one mentoring, workshops, and skills assessments, while the program also facilitates access to training qualifications for teachers and young professionals as skills coaches. The SFP is optimized to run on a web portal, however a mobile app is also in development to ensure that the program is brought to the fingertips of everyone everywhere. This proposed Pathways application platform will also host our globally dispersed peer-to-peer networks or user communities.   

We recognize the importance of soft skills development especially in an increasingly automated world. Movaar seeks to place the individual at the center of our global networks with businesses and institutions supporting them to promote causes that are of benefit to entire communities. We seek to accomplish that first by strengthening individuals into communities of interest with the objective of designing local initiatives tackling local challenges; before creating and mapping these efforts around the world into interactive global networks. Harnessing from this synergy has major implications from widening our focus from building up individual to community capabilities to supporting academic research and development as a process.

The Pathways software is a new application of an existing technology, while the Skills Formation Program is a process for this Solve Challenge. The program components incorporate conventional teaching techniques alongside novel ways to assess learning, structured around a curriculum optimized for 21st century education. The ICT-enabled diaspora engagement aspect in all our programs maximizes the resources accessible to the community-based solutions creation process. Our knowledge exchange and peer-to-peer networks ensure that our members around the world can learn from each other, while also reinforcing education in communities experiencing shortages, through exchanges and a virtualized skills transfer and acquisition program. 

Our digital presence extends over three platforms while technology enables us to source, mobilize, and link dispersed human resource capabilities to targetted communities.

i) our web portal facilitates access to a dashboard for users to track their progress and engage with the different features of the program.

ii) our Pathways app exemplifies our usage of ICTs to bridge the physical distance between our various stakeholders and make changemaking an inclusive process.

iii) social media helps us organize our peer-to-peer networks, currently engaged through What’s App and Facebook groups. 

Over the next 12 months, our goals are centered around expansion and scaling. Specifically, we seek to:

Expand into multiple regions in The Gambia while promoting domestic and international partnerships by launching a digitally enhanced SFP pilot in one other African country and one American city in 2019.

Domestically in The Gambia, we also target training 100 students from our strategic public sector institutional partners working in the main sectors of economy e.g. tourism, through technical and vocational training, with the objective of supporting the conversion of community-based development solution proposals into viable micro and small enterprises to spur job creation. 

In three years Movaar will be:   

expanding into rural Gambia

operating internationally

launching a dedicated program to support our micro and small enterprise development aspirations;

While in five years, Movaar will be:

operating across three continents with strong private and public sector partners;

supporting three successful incubated small enterprise start-ups and facilitating their access to business-to-business networks; 

growing international peer-to-peer networks;

building a global Knowledge-Exchange Network;

Supporting Corporate Social Responsibility projects in communities affected by corporate activities.  

We are shifting from nomination based participation to application based participation for the SFP coordinated through radio, television, and web (social media) advertising. We have also been engaged in both public (namely government) and private partnerships through MOU’s and Business Partnership Agreements with firms in multiple sectors. Once we have established a linkage to our target beneficiaries and partners through outreach, advertising, and government support, we will maintain them on our peer-to-peer community of interest networks deployed via both online and offline platforms. Strategic partnerships will also ensure that we have access to new networks and platforms.  

We quantify the number of individuals that we have affected directly and indirectly at 200 and 500 respectively.  Quantitatively, we have contributed to a 20 percent increase in number of hours that youths commit to extra curricula teaching and learning; recorded a high school to workforce conversation rate of approximately 60 percent; and increased access to professional networks for our members. We have also contributed to the number of skillset per individual; the high school-to-college conversation rate i.e. approximately 80% (local) and 15% (international); and the number of high school students graduating with extra curricula certificates and finding work. 

Over the next 12 months, we envision serving 500 people directly and 1500 people indirectly considering our graduates that secure a job or like professional opportunity and through word-of-mouth promotion, increase our event participation rate. Also, through our monthly open workshop series, and support to micro and small ventures our impact will be even more wide-reaching i.e. through indirect employment creation.

These expected outputs were concluded in consideration of the demand for extra curricula and specialized educational services, but also by the caliber of our marketable graduates who attract demand from prospective members and employers in industry. 

The top three skills that my team posses are our networking abilities, international experience, and our leadership qualities. The combined fellowship experience of our founding team gives us access to dynamic global networks of talented young professionals. Our multicultural backgrounds empower us to apply our unique cultural experiences into our decision making and designing our end user experience, necessitated by the diversity of our generic program beneficiary. Finally, our leadership qualities have enabled us to persevere in very limited resource environments against extraordinary odds. 

Our social enterprise model has two main revenue streams: fees from the Skills Formation Program, and shares in the incubated ventures created through our enterprise development support. Specifically, we will introduce 

SFP enrollment fees - paid ONLY by our young professional and teacher trainees; 

Service fees - from designing tailor made training programs for our corporate and institutional level partners; 

Advertising - for schools and firms; 

Shares – Movaar will retain shares in the incubated ventures through diminishing partnership agreements to initially help with growth management and navigating into new markets as a way to crowd in potential investors and structure our smooth exit over a three to five year period to grant our entrepreneurs full independence. 

We am applying to Solve because we relish the opportunity to speak about the problems that Movaar is currently tackling; gain insights from the Board of Advisors; and finally, meet with potential investors to deliver the Movaar pitch. Solve helps to advance Movaar because it places us on a platform to boost our brand and solution while exposing us to the frontier of our field where we can make strategic connections and partnership. At this stage of our growth, a platform like Solve presents a major opportunity to make our transition from piloting to scaling and attracting our first investment. 

The two main barriers that Movaar faces are funding and lack of capacity in terms of personnel and resources. Specifically, funding would enable us to expand the reach of the SFP into new locations and carry out the necessary steps in that process. Personnel and resource capacity would facilitate talent acquisition and accelerate the process of completing our digital transformation. Selection into Solve would help address both constraints by enabling us to finance our planned goals, but also join a community that exposes us to potential partners and investors.  Penetrating the American market is also crucial for our business model.