Digital learning territories

In Mexico, the COVID-19 pandemic not only highlighted the socio-economic inequalities in access to healthcare that were experienced by most rural and indigenous communities but also exacerbated the existing gaps related to education, as well as the use of and access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The latter is mainly associated with the lack of infrastructure, due to the lower coverage of telecommunications services in rural areas. In 2018, the state of Oaxaca had 27.1% of its population with educational backwardness, occupying 2nd place among the 32 states for their levels of this deficiency. These figures show that 13.53% of the population aged 15 and over are illiterate, compared to 5.49% at the national level; 51.38% of the population aged 15 and over in the state do not have completed basic education, compared to 35.29% at the national level. Likewise, according to the ICT Development Index, the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero and Veracruz have the lowest level of access to ICTs at the national level (SIU, 2020), the same states that have the highest rates of indigenous people living in poverty and extreme poverty.

The above data illustrates the difficulties that many children in rural communities still face today in continuing virtual education. In this sense, the insertion of ICTs that are within the reach of communities can be a way to address educational inequality and encourage children in rural contexts to relate to their environment and their learning in a new way, strengthening knowledge and learning that allow them to know and exercise their rights within their communities.

Digital learning territories is a program designed to provide children from ages 9 to 13 a new way of re-engaging with learning process in the middle and moving forward from the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the use of tablets as technological tools, they explore their communities, their history, and reinforce topics learned at school. The program guides participants through four modules of learning, each with a particular project to be completed, that will together amount to the creation of a time capsule that contains a snapshot of their communities at the moment of creation. Through this exploration process, each participant must use creativity and resourcefulness to research each prompt and integrate activities through the tablet with pictures, videos, and abilities related to uploading documents to the cloud, and participating in conversations through videoconferencing platforms. 

Each participant has a volunteer tutor that follows their progress and makes sure to enable strategies to improve participation or solve doubts about the contents of the program. They meet via video conference platforms, which helps strengthen abilities related to the use of diverse platforms. 

The solution aims to re-engage children in their community life, engage in research activities with their peers and the elders of the community, to enhace skills, socialization processes in an effort to re-imagine rural education in the face of inequality that COVID-19 revealed.

The project will impact the lives of children with existing structural disadvatages in rural and indigenous communities from 3 regions of Oaxaca, Mexico. Students in these areas hardly receive education through the use of technology, unlike their peers in urban schools, which further increases the gap between the two groups. The project is designed as an educational program with the possibility of being replicated and scaled up, seeking adaptability to each context and continuous evaluation so that the lessons learned are relevant to the children involved. Carrying out pedagogical strategies based on learning-by-doing that attend to the needs of children in these contexts is essential for their formation as active and participatory agents in their communities. The development of a playful and effective technological tool for the types of devices that are most relevant in these rural contexts will be useful for the self-directed learning of children who do not have access to this information in their traditional schools or curricula. Also, the active participation of project learning will lead them to have incidences and practical exercises that will lead them to have a particular involvement with the community, applying their knowledge and integrating various themes into the social life of their communities.

Fondo para la Paz is an organization composed by people with diverse backgrounds and expertise. Each region has a team of people from the communities or region, so that the experience of locally designed projects comes directly from people who understand and live the context, and is able to prioritize what is important in each community through participatory planning processes. There is another team, in the Oaxaca office, with over 18 years of experience in community development and in working closely with the communities the project aims to impact. In the central offices in Mexico City, the team of project managers is integrated by individuals with ample experience in working with rural and indigenous communities, developing projects with youth and technology, and coordinating teams from varied contexts.  

The program and network that Solve provides are essential to the improvement and continuation of the project because the pilot implementation now requires feedback and improvements. Our program is designed to be adaptable and scalable, all with the necessary adjustments that can be exchanged and learned through the knowledge that other Solve participants and its network of experts can provide. The project will benefit from being part of a group interested in community-based solutions to global challenges. 

We provide children in rural communities with a self-paced process, through which they learn to use technology as a tool for learning, research, and data processing. This improves their education process and can contribute to building momentum for students to remain in school. The use of technology to learn will contribute to students being independent and self-taught learners, providing important tools that can help breach the gap between students in rural and urban schools. The project takes a bet on young children, striving to familiarize them with digital skills that will become essential in their middle and higher education stages.

In the next year we will look for further funding to expand the pilot and the amount of children the program reaches. Also, to look for strategies that will allow for a continuation of the first stage of the program to be implemented with participants from the first pilot run. 

This second stage will allow the participants to deepen their technological learning and generate community roots, enabling them to generate greater involvement with their communities. Also, the program will have an impact on training with a Human Rights perspective, resulting in children who are familiar with and able to identify problems in their daily lives, as well as solve challenges and identify elements of cultural and environmental value in their contexts. For the next five years we seek to reach 200 children that have strengthened digital skills to close the gap in the digital literacy gap in rural areas of Mexico.

• Number of children who successfully complete the education program.

• Percentage of participants who strengthen their self-directed learning skills and the use of educational tools.

• Proportion of participants who recognize that technological tools are important and useful for the education and learning process. 

• Number of children who identify an increase in their knowledge of Human and Cultural Rights.

The program contributes to the formative process of 72 children at the upper primary level, with a comprehensive non-formal education program and access to technology tools to reduce the digital and educational gap in three municipalities of Oaxaca.  During the past year, the pilot program was launched, where evaluations with participants and Fondo para la Paz’s teams identified important elements that could complement and enhance the experience, such as the integration of a specific focus on social, cultural, and environmental rights. In this sense, for this second stage, the program will be redesigned considering the creation of a new educational module with an emphasis on Human Rights and Cultural Capital, which will complement the learning expected after participation in the program. In addition to developing a digital platform of accompanied learning specifically for use in the educational program. This platform will allow us to host content for consulting information, such as the guide to the educational program, educational videos, and supplementary material, as well as allow us to systematize the educational experience and the accompaniment of the participants, with integrated consultation tools. This is in addition to making better use of technology equipment, as well as a more tailored approach to technology for girls and boys. At the end of the education program, 72 participants from three regions of the state of Oaxaca will strengthen their self-directed learning skills and use of educational tools. In addition, they will have new learnings applied to a project related to Human Rights and Cultural Rights. This will lead them to have a strengthened understanding of these issues and promote their active participation in their communities. Through the program, they will have access to educational tools and meaningful training processes that will promote their knowledge of their community.

Our solution combines the use of digital tools like videos, text, and cloud services to improve skills in the usage of technology for research and schooling purposes. The interface is presented through an electronic tablet, which contains the digital components of the program. We aim to include software in the form of an app to integrate the entire content and make the program more accessible. Considering challenges in the communities where the program is piloted, a printed copy of the learning guide is also provided. This integrates the use of local knowledge to preserve traditions, in the form of oral and written knowledge that is selected and included in the time capsule as part of the final project.

Fondo para la Paz is currently led by a diverse group of people, all involved in different stages of their careers. Women lead 30% of teams and are 50% of decision-makers in the organization. The organization fosters a diverse environment, with people from different rural or indigenous communities taking part in the organization’s most important decisions. A participatory planning strategy brings diverse backgrounds into the room, as well as different formative backgrounds and expertise areas, to enrich the perspectives within our teams. Equity is a pilar in the opportunity making process in Fondo para la Paz. Although we have a long way to go, it is important that an organization in Mexico has women in a significant amount of leadership roles. Inclusion is a work in progress, where the organization welcomes people from all backgrounds, identities, and preferences. We are working to generate projects that can help build the organization into a more inclusive and respectful environment. 

Our business model is geared towards targeting key stakeholders in the digital innovation and education sectors, considerin that the beneficiaries of our program are the children in rural and indigenous communities, who benefit and participate in the learning process. Our beneficiaries, besides the students involved, become the communities and each family, since the closing of the digital literacy gap benefits the children, and therefore, their families and improves opportunities for each community. Parents are concearned about how their children face upper level schooling challenges, when they are faced with tech-related assignments that they cannot solve because they lack basic computing skills. Our customers are education institutions and government officials related to providing education in rural areas. The key resources are the electronic tablets trough which the program is developed, and the audiovisual material related to the program itself. The intervention is a workshop-type of event, and as a self-paced learning process. The program, our product/service is provided from an early age, to ensure that these skills improve and are honed through middle and higher education, tackling the problem before it exists as a limitation, and is instead, an opportunity. This is a low-cost and very scalable project, which targets financial allies and customers well, being that with a small investment a big impact can be made.

Fondo para la Paz is constantly seeking technical and financial partners, which has allowed us to expand the coverage of the projects that have been implemented in previous years. It is expected that this process will continue to be integrated and active in order to ensure the continuity of the results of this project while obtaining funding. We will seek to secure sustained donations or grants to continue to improve and expand the project.

In 2020 we were selected to receive a significant grant of approximately $23,000 USD from a banking institution’s foundation, which allowed us to run the pilot implementation of the program. This project allowed us to finance the design and development of the program with an education expert as a consultant, and design the contents of the guide. The use of resources was effectively managed to be able to cover an array of activities needed to start the run of the project.