Espacio Educa

Through training programs in front-end development and 21st-century skills, our venture seeks to connect recent high-school grads of low-income communities in Venezuela to job opportunities in tech.

Espacio EDUCA is a tech-ed non-profit venture located in Caracas, and running its operations in Petare one of the poorest communities of Venezuela.

We created a computer science classroom, in partnership with a local school of the community, where students gain access to the internet and laptops for free. The main activity of Espacio EDUCA is to offer coding (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) courses and 21st-century skills workshops to help recent graduates secure higher-paying jobs in the tech industry. 

In order to graduate from the program, each student must finish an intensive course of +90 hours of classes, develop projects after each class module and develop a final project that helps to solve a problem of the community.

Our venture helps to connect the student after graduating, with internship opportunities in tech companies of the city.

We hope to impact the lives of the more than 100 students in 5 years currently attending the School and help develop the careers of talented teenagers in the community. 

In the future, we see our impact expanding to many different communities in Venezuela and abroad!

The problem that Espacio EDUCA seeks to solve is the difficult access to technology and the limited opportunities for professional and personal growth for young adolescents in low-income areas. 

According to a local survey's done by partner-school in low-income neighborhoods, 80% of families have no computers at home. This school, in which Espacio EDUCA operates, serves a student population of more than 1400 students. That statistic implies that 1120 families do not have access to a single computer and this is only one of many schools in its community. 

As Venezuelans, we often believe in social mobility systems, but the reality is that for many young people it is difficult to improve the quality of life without proper training in skills demanded by the labor market. Learning these skills requires access to technologies that they do not have; nor do they have support or guides to help them create a comprehensive life project.

The target market is: young adolescents aged 16-18 who live in low-income areas, are in their last year of secondary education, and therefore are going to enter the labor market or begin their higher education one year after they start in the program. They would use EDUCA as a solution since most of the target market does not have access to computers at home and would be part of our training program, which is perceived as a scholarship and a unique opportunity. This last point was confirmed by interviews with teenagers in Petare. 

Our main goal is to develop useful training programs in coding for senior students looking for a job after graduating from school, that serves potential employers searching for talented individuals in the field of web development and coding. In order to accomplish that goal:

1) We conducted market research with tech companies in Caracas, in order to understand some job-market needs in the tech field. 

2) We created an alliance with an American NGO with KnowHow in training programs in tech, that helped us to develop a curriculum for each one of the classes of the program.

3) We created a strong alliance with professors of a local community school and we developed more than 7 interviews with them, in order to understand the student´s needs, passions, motivations, barriers to growth, and potential.

4) We conducted more than 10 interviews and conversations with potential students, in order to understand their needs, passions, motivations, barriers to growth, and potential. 

Our findings helped us to develop a value proposition that is end-to-end centered on our students and our ambition to help them achieve more through education.

Currently, Espacio Educa is on a Pilot Stage. Some key elements to go on deep dive:

- We are running our first training program in a local school of a community called Petare, in Caracas Venezuela. In September we created a computer science classroom within the school's library and as of today, we are conducting the 5th module of our syllabus. (out of 10)

- 15 students from senior year of high school have been attending extracurricular classes on Saturdays since September. The attendance rate has been superior to 92% in the first 13 classes. The levels of participation, commitment, and motivation are astonishing, and we've received very positive feedback from the students, their parents, and the school.

- Currently, we are conducting a module of classes in professional skills in which students will practice job interviews, email writing, and resumé writing in order to apply to internship opportunities in April. 

- Looking forward to the expansion, on February we will be pitching the project to a community school that approach us with interest to develop the training programs in their school. 

Espacio Educa is a social venture focused on education in technology for employment. We apply our knowledge in programming languages in order to give classes each Saturday of the School Year.

We are giving the first tech-related classes for our students on HTML, CSS, JQuery, and JavaScript. We are also giving workshops in 21st-century skills for employment.

In order to graduate from the program, students are required to apply this coding knowledge to solve a problem in their community. Doing so, besides practicing their new capabilities, they are applying entrepreneurial thinking in order to tackle real social problems through their talents and ideas.

Currently, our solution indirectly impacts a student population of 1400 students as all of them have open access to our computer science classroom for personal and academic purposes. However, the direct beneficiaries of our pilot programming course are 15 teenagers.

EDUCA plans to expand to at least another school during 2022, which would expand its indirect beneficiaries to 2500. We also plan on offering more courses related to programming and technology to younger audiences to expand the reach of our program. With an additional offering of yearly courses, and EDUCA operating in more Schools, we could reach around 50 yearly direct beneficiaries by 2022.

Our main impact goal for next year is to 3x the number of direct beneficiaries of our program. We want to go from 15 students to 50 students in the next 12 months.

We want to expand our venture to a second school and duplicate the number of classes given by the school year in each school. In the pilot stage, we conducted one cohort in Petare; next year we want to conduct two cohorts in Petare and one cohort in another low-income community of our city, Caracas. 

We also want to create another computer science lab in the second school, in order to increase access to technology in more low-income communities of our city.

Our impact goals are grouped into three main categories: Employment,  learning, and civic participation.

In the employment category, we are measuring: % of students getting an internship after the program, % of students getting a tech internship after the program, and % of students working in freelance jobs after the program.

In the learning category, we are measuring: Number of schools in which we operate, number of students receiving training programs, % of students attending classes, % of students delivering homework, quality of websites created by students, number of independent study hours, and quality of independent programs. 

In the civic participation category, we are measuring: quality of the final project and the number of students returning the next year as teacher assistants in their school.

Each one of these KPIs is focused on the specific skills students are receiving from our training program. They are also helping us to improve our ability to better serve and deliver an attractive training program in tech for our students.

We have three main barriers in our venture. 

Market Barriers: the main goal of our venture (employment) is influenced by a sluggish job market in a low-performing economy like Venezuela.

Financial barriers: We have constant operational costs (logistics and operations costs) may limit our ability to constantly deliver our classes.

Legal barriers: Social venture without a formal registration as a company in Venezuela.

We are a group of highly motivated undergrad students aiming to create a better world through our actions. We are a group of young Venezuelans wanting to rebuild our country with our ideas and talents. We are a group of friends wanting to change the life of a new generation of low-income students through education and technology. We believe in their talent, and that is why we have a commitment to them.

In our team, each one of us plays a critical role in the success of our training programs. 

Our protagonists are 7 STEM-related undergrad students that are volunteering as teachers in the venture. Their level of commitment and talent is amazing.

We´ve created a diverse team from different majors (Economics, Business, Marketing, Literature, Education, Psychology) to deliver a strong value proposition for our students. 

We have a strong alliance with a local school run by the church called María Inmaculada. The school is run by Maribel Quiroz and her team in Petare, a slum in Caracas. They work endlessly to ensure all 1,400 students receive a proper education. We created a computer science classroom in their library and we've been running our operation in their school since September.

We also have an important ally, which is called The Resolution Project Inc. They were the first to believe in our project in the Social Venture Challenge in February 2021. We've received important resources, funding, and mentoring from the organization. With their support the pilot of Espacio Educa is a reality.

Espacio Educa is a social venture determined to improve way opportunities in education-for-employment in low-income of our country Venezuela and our Region LATAM.

Our simple, yet comprehensive, approach to developing highly demanded abilities in the poorest population of our country, it's increasing the chances of less fortunate young folks to join the workforce of the future. We believe that it may become a model to increase opportunities for talented young students of the poorer communities of our region. 

We believe that our solution is relevant in a job market like Latam, where companies find barriers to hiring highly developed talents in tech, and at the same time, levels of youth unemployment are rising since years ago.

We are a group of highly motivated undergrad students wanting to create a better world and a better future for everyone, committed to rebuilding our country Venezuela and improving the lives of hundreds of students through our venture.