Camp Colorá

Empowering rural high school students to pursue higher education through mentoring from university students in an in-person itinerant one-week bootcamp.

Our team has observed first-hand the difficulties for accessing higher education in rural areas of Colombia, such as ignoring the possibilities and the academic offer, and lack of mentoring. For contributing to solve this issue, we propose a platform to connect senior high school students with university students through a one-week in-person bootcamp. High school students would receive mentoring and guidance for accessing higher education, while college students would promote impact tourism in remote areas.

To connect them, we consider the common interests and themes chosen at each site. Once matched, we develop a diagnosis and a mapping of motivations and aspirations to determine the step by step to follow. As a result, the mentored student will obtain the necessary tools that will lead them to access higher education.

The duration of each camp depends on the number of people and the resources available at the site; however, the recommended duration is a maximum of one week.

After the camp, by common agreement, both mentor and mentee can stay in touch by chatting through messaging apps like Whatsapp or Telegram.

The problem we want to solve is the lack of connection between students in rural areas, and the existing academic offer and opportunities to access higher education.

In Colombia, 68% of the universities are located in the main cities of the country, which leaves the other areas without higher education coverage. Furthermore, only 2.4% of rural youth can access an undergraduate degree. This situation perpetuates the lack of opportunities and the repetition of the cycle of abandonment in rural areas of Colombia: If the opportunity to break this cycle is not given, there will be no greater homogeneity in the territory.

To give you a glimpse of the scale of the problem, in 2015 there were about 595,000 high school graduates from rural areas of Colombia, between 17 and 25 years old. From the total of this population, about 500,000 declare not to be studying, and 85% of them report not taking any year of higher education. This means that even though they have fulfilled the requirement of completion of secondary education, they did not enter higher education or dropped out at some point.

Our team identified some key factors that contribute to this problem are:

• Poor academic preparation.

• Lack of knowledge of the existing academic offer.

• Centralization of education in the urban sector.

  

Our target audience is young people between 15 and 22 years old, who are rural residents in their final years of high school or recent graduates, whose lack of knowledge of the academic offer, poor vocational orientation and centralization of opportunities prevents them from accessing quality education.

We aim to reach students where there is already some educational offer as it would be easier to develop a successful program, and contact local institutions and students. That is why we collaborated with the largest university of the country: Universidad Nacional de Colombia. It has nationwide campuses, including remote areas such as Tumaco in the Pacific coast, San Andres Island in the Caribbean Sea, and Leticia in the Amazon Jungle, to name just a few.

Our mission is to empower them to change their mindset by giving them a much broader view on study opportunities. We hope to motivate them to transform their dreams into tangible, achievable goals, by providing close examples of people who have already found a path to follow their dreams.

Our team created our concept solution considering final users, as we really want it to respond to their context and lifestyle. For this reason, the first thing we did was to establish contact with the potential users, that is, students in rural areas. Through surveys and interviews, we delved deeper into the context and the specific problem and then we talked with them to validate our ideas and receive feedback on whether the proposal would work and effectively solve the problem or not.

Additionally, two out of the three members of the team have participated in projects focused on improving education and opportunities in rural areas of the country. Their experience allowed us easier contact with the potential users.

For example, Felipe went as a volunteer to Mitú, a remote town deep into the Amazon jungle, and worked promoting STEM disciplines among high school indigenous students. In the case of Viviana, she worked on another project in the municipality of Boyacá, in a town called Arcabuco, where she was able to develop different activities to identify the needs, frustrations, motivations and other important aspects of rural life and education.

Our project is currently at the concept stage, since we have mainly focused on understanding as much as we can the problem and how can we formulate the right solution.

For the past couple of months, we have built our design by covering the context of rural education in Colombia, key factors contributing to our problem, identification of requirements, stakeholders, enablers and constraints and information on the problem itself.

We have also focused on getting to know our target users, learning about them and their reality through surveys, interviews and analysis of the data and information obtained.

Once we understood the problem and our target user, we have spent the last couple of weeks iterating on ideas, getting feedback on them and planning our first pilot. We have already set the project environment, strategic objectives, required resources, KPI's, a team of volunteers and partnerships. We are currently applying for funding from local ONGs. Finally, we are being mentored by a Solver® who is also working on education.

The platform that powers our solution is a web page. Although it is not as innovative as other technologies, the context of our potential users and our interviews with them showed that they would prefer an easy-to-use solution with as little interaction from their side as possible. With this in mind and looking for a global reach, a web page was identified as the best way to do it.

This web page is designed for mentors, not mentees.Our team fills up the information required from the mentees' side. It would present the following functionalities:

• An overview of the project, the problem we a’re trying to solve, its context and the solution we a’re providing.

• A list of available and soon-to-be-available camps, specifying location, approximate dates, required mentor profile, mentees needs and similar details.

• A registration section where mentors register and fill up a form with their basic information and mentor profile (knowledge area, experience, preferred locations, goals, etc.).

• Behind the scenes, an algorithm will match mentors with a camp, according to the needs and expectations of both mentees and mentors.

• A notification system, e-mail or SMS, providing people with updates on their application.

In order to create a long lasting impact, both mentor and mentee can stay in touch after the camp, by common agreement, chatting through messaging apps like Whatsapp or Telegram.

Since we have not launched it yet, on the one hand, we plan to provide mentoring to between 75 to 125 rural students by the end of 2022. Based on our research, our pilot boot camp will be in one location (Tumaco) with students from 3 to 5 high schools, with roughly 25 students each. On the other hand, a mentor would be required for every 5 mentees, thus a total of 15 to 25 mentors (volunteer university students) will be reached.

We expect to create a cascade effect where people who have participated in the program recommend it to their peers, thus reinforcing our partnerships with local institutions.

• By 2024, increase by 10%, for each school with which we have held a camp, the number of rural students who are able to enter higher education.

• By 2024, generate our own sources of income from the project, so that we can cover at least 50% of the costs for each camp.

• By 2023, create a program with gender equality, where 50% of the participants are women and 50% are men.

• By the end of 2023, hold at least one camp in each of the 5 nationwide campuses from our partner.

• By 2023, increase the number of strategic alliances that allow us to reduce the costs of each camp by 10%.

As we haven’t launched we’re not currently measuring impact, but we do have some indicators we have plan to measure, associated with the UN Sustainable Development Goals #4 (Education) and #10 (Inequality):

• Proportion of rural students in grade 11 who, upon completing their studies and attending the camp, have obtained a place in higher education institutions.

• Number of rural students participating (mentees) in the camp, broken down by gender.

• Number of university students (mentors) who have taken part in the camp, broken down by gender.

• Recurrence rate of mentors (the more the better) and rural students (the less the better).

• Retention rate: How many participants start and finish the in-person camp and how many of them stay in touch with their mentor after the camp.

• One of the main barriers may be the COVID 19 pandemic, since in rural areas isolation can make it much more difficult to reach students.

• The context in which camps are developed, since many of the places we want to reach have different traditions and have not had a timely approach to education, so the mindset shift against this requires a proper approach to the community.

• Technological limitations, since in rural areas resources are limited, as well as access to internet and cell phones.

We’re a team of 3 final year undergraduate students from Universidad Nacional de Colombia: 

Viviana Alfonso, industrial design student and volunteer in +MujeresUX Bogotá where we generate links of support for women to join the UX world. Additionally, I’m part of the Turing research group where we work on projects related to education and technology. I am always looking to learn and strengthen my skills and abilities, so I take online courses on platforms like Coursera and Platzi. As a designer in training and student I am passionate about women empowerment, technology, education, people-centered design, UX and systems thinking. 

Felipe Zuñiga, mechatronics engineering student and founder of NASA award winning MIND research group (NASA HERC 2021),Turing co-creation and research group and currently Google Developer Student Club Lead. I have experience creating, scaling and leading goal oriented projects and impact driven communities. Coming from a small and remote city myself and moving to a big city in order to study, I have experienced first hand what lack of opportunities and mentoring means, thus I have dedicated my life to provide others with them.

Julian Velandia, mechatronics engineering student and backend software developer at MercadoLibre in the fintech initiative, building the technological infrastructure for thousands of MercadoPago users for Brazil, I am also part of the Turing research group where we work on projects related to education and technology. I am passionate about new technologies and ways to connect them with solutions.

Currently, we have partnered with 4 organizations:

• Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, our alma mater, provides us with technological infrastructure, spaces and economic resources.

• The 5 “Presencia Nacional” nationwide campuses of Universidad Nacional, which are campuses located in remote geographic areas, with the goal to help rural and impoverished communities access college. As most of their students come from the surrounding schools, they’re the perfect scenario for our project.

• The Turing research group, it’s the organization that houses the project and through which we receive funds from the university and local NGOs.

• Google, Microsoft and GitHub, through their Campus Ambassador programs, they provide us with technological infrastructure and mentoring.