1BOT STEAM FOR ENTREPRENEURS

Problem statement

According to data gathered by Unicef, girls are doing poorly in rural education. The system is not providing the tools and content that either does not engage them and provide a quality platform from which to launch their ambitions, or fails to deliver a strong value proposition to parents who eventually opt out of the school project. Roughly 6 out of every 10 girls in school finish elementary. Of these 6, only 2 graduate from high school. Of these 2, only 1 pursues a higher education. After that, it becomes a binary statistic as to whether a university diploma is ultimately earned. These numbers are abysmal. 

A study conducted by Unicef (Annex 1) over data collected by the Government through a 2018 national census divided into age groups the reasons for children not attending school. Several categories were included such as “lack of money, sickness, lack of interest by child, parental consideration of insufficient age, undeclared, etc.”. The age groups were four: 3-6 years old, 7-12 years-old, 13-15 years old, and 16-17 years-old. The reasons and results varied across these age groups. But only one variable remained constant in all age groups: “lack of interest by the child”. As long as this trend continues, rural girls will not thrive in their adult life. They will remain anchored to a life within the confinements of their homes and husbands. The problem is they haven't been exposed to the opportunity that technology and entrepreneurship gives them to financially take hold of their lives and loved ones. 

Why is the problem relevant?

The relevance of the problem in lack of interest by children in education has many explanations. We detect two. First, schooling rates in a system that does not cater to the needs and interests of 21st century children is bound to remain low. Even if there is increased investment in education and infrastructure, children will not find any motivation in attending or excelling if they do not perceive any value in doing so. Furthermore, a system that does not succeed in attracting children will not succeed in persuading them of its value. Second, there are no reasons as to why any success in retaining children in an obsolete educational system will further motivate them to launch ambitious careers. Boys will continue to graduate into agriculture, and girls will continue to graduate into taking care of household chores. The biggest stakeholder in this, the parents, know this. That is why they are not allies of the current educational system. No systemic change will come about continuing to engage with children in the same manner. 

1bot develops internally two components to tackle this challenge. First, we co-design curricula with Guatemala’s highest ranked university to align our methodology with both international standards and the government authorized curriculum. We build on top of this material to turn it into easily absorbable content, multimedia, and exercises by students and easy to use guides for teachers. Second, we create digital channels that feed the school and students with content wherever they are without the need for data. Our internally developed servers store our entire content and exercise matrix with which our students can interact seamlessly, helping us gather analytics on their performance and challenges. All our solutions are open-source and can be leveraged by other education providers or interested parties.

Most of the curricula is already developed and turned into easily absorbable and engaging content for children. Nevertheless, we are always seeking ways to expand the breadth of content and skills to empower children for the future. As such, we are currently developing a second iteration of our entrepreneurship module. This time, with the backing and support of Guatemala's top entrepreneurship institution: Kirzner Entrepreneurship Center at Universidad Francisco Marroquin. Given the opportunity and the right partnership, we will always seek to expand into new content curricula and creation to deliver 21st Century skills beyond STEM and Entrepreneurship. 

Communities that are subject to high poverty levels, accompanied by poor education standards due to remote locations. Education materials are obsolete in many cases and in poor conditions. As a result, they suffer from high student desertion and turnover. The Impact of these dynamics in children are vast. Primarily because they are high risk regions, for example our most recent implementation is located at a border region subject to high migration to Mexico. The impact on girls is twofold. First, they acquire no functional and relevant knowledge in schools and, as stated before, remain anchored to their homes and family. Second, as migration occurs they are left by themselves to take care of their loved ones or children without any assistance. A catalytic change can come about in these regions if the right educational methodologies are in place, aided by technology and entrepreneurial lessons. These girls could rise to the task of lifting themselves out of poverty and bring about wealth and jobs creation in rural Guatemala. 

We have successfully developed and implemented solutions for 22 schools and onboarded +2,000 rural students during the hybrid era of education due to the pandemic. We have secured approximately 3,000 rural students for 2022, largely in part to satisfied clients broadening the scope of their coverage and new sponsors coming into effect, such as a new impact investment fund supporting +500 new students. Our local servers meet rural students' educational needs and bridge a gap between traditional, physical world constraints, allowing them to receive world-class STEM education. Given our digital distribution of content, we can monitor continually engagement and gain insights on our students. For instance, 58% of our active students were girls versus 42% of boys -a testament to gender mainstreaming within traditional school settings. 

As stated previously, Building on top of our STEM education platform with pre-existing courses, designed by Universidad del Valle, and with over 3,000 registered students with unique user profiles, we will introduce a new set of tools designed in collaboration with Universidad Francisco Marroquin’s Kirzner Entrepreneurship Center (leaders in financial and entrepreneurial higher education) a module adapted for students in elementary and high school in rural Guatemala. The project seeks to induce entrepreneurial and financial skills on top of our existing technology and coding programs. The initial aim of this program is to enable teen students in specific migrating communities in Quetzaltenango, Huehuetenango, San Marcos, El Progreso, Peten, and the Capital to turn their newfound skill in technology to real world solving skills. We see the project as ambitious since we will turn proven methodologies in higher education to school-level business language and concepts. We have proven that our pre-existing programs reduce dropout rates significantly, in some cases by 30%, just by elevating the quality and content. Additionally, active users within the platform went from 45% attendance prior to registering to 100% after the program was launched. Currently, with connectivity tools like our local servers, we can deploy the entrepreneurship modules seamlessly and immediately to our growing user base, and more. 

We will be able to accelerate the program. For the entrepreneurial modules, we will target teens in 8th and 9th grades. The reason for this is that these ages are decisive in these communities as to whether to continue school, find low-paying jobs, or directly migrate. We are the most impactful part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem and funnel because we will deliver the skills and knowledge to students at a catalytic moment: when they are deciding their future, consciously or passively. And as our data shows, underpinning our user base are girls. We see this as the perfect opportunity set to leverage our engagement with entrepreneurial skills to empower them to create opportunities for themselves and their communities.

We are aiming to grow the private school user baser. As such, we are looking to solve the PR and marketing campaigns. This entails a strong social networks presence, sales-oriented web page, and other elements that can be introduced to help boost sales to private schools, which finance our efforts to keep an accessible prices to rural students. 

We develop content and deliver it seamlessly. Collaborating with Universidad del Valle de Guatemala and Universidad Francisco Marroquín, we develop a curriculum that integrates into the classroom to promote STEAM and entrepreneurship. Our intranet servers allow us to create a direct channel of communication with the classroom and each individual student, bypassing the physical constraints that traditional methods imply. This channel of communication renders data in almost real time about student performance regardless if they are engaging offline. Our ADA servers give us a scale to reach rural communities is of great importance. It is the basis of a catalytic change that can come about if children can learn about technology and its practical application in their lives. Creating problem-solving children with an entrepreneurial mindset can create wealth in remote areas. In cases where irregular migration is an issue, gathering these abilities and skills can mean the difference between staying close to family or risking their lives in search for alternative opportunities. It all starts with bringin back value to education, which is our passion. In short, we innovate in content and in our delivery mechanism. 

Our ultimate goal is to bridge the gap between private and public education. We plan on doing this by continuing to bring down the cost of updated and validated education through innovations such as our intranet servers (ADA). The result of achieving this goal will mean that more valuable human capital is generated by the public educational system. We already have a working solution. This means we have a solution that reaches more than 3,000 students across rural Guatemala and monitors their performance and development. We see attendance rates going up in all instances. We see a high participation rate (almost 50/50) among females. In our schools located near the border with Mexico, we see interest in class going up. This has been a key metric for us to follow. 

In the next year, we want to reach more private schools. This will allow us to implement the 1-for-1 program that co-finances public schools. This is a proven sustainable business model that already operates in several schools and supports the equal number of public schools. We seek help in our PR campaign to make ourselves known.

Since these are young students that still have several years before graduation and intro into the labor market, we target within the next 5 years to keep growing our student base registered in the online platform to grow to 10,000. This is an attainable goal since we are in a piloting phase in San Marcos with a sponsor that wants to grow the program to thousands more in 2023 (targeting 7 to 8 thousand).

We measure two main broad indicators to evaluate our trajectory. 

We measure the performance indicators of students through our open-source platform. This platform is fed by data collected on site by our intranet servers. Each individual user feeds user interaction and module completion, with its intricacies, to our HQ and allows us to evaluate their efforts and contrast that to how we can improve on content. Indicators such as login times, completion, exercise upload, difficulties, video tutorial playbacks, etc.give us a good matrix on which to evaluate our progress. Because each user is unique, we can gather data on user interests, gender, abilities and challenges. Our metrics give us good status on the health of the program and its impact on attendance and interest in school.

Once we have an overall good health check on the program, we measure the amount of children. Because we assess that the program is of benefit to students, we are in growth mode. We measure the demographic and location of students to impact most of the students that are at risk, whether migration or of falling into the agricultural career path (mainly on the highlands). 

Our theory of change starts with the activities that we carry out. We will create valuable, easily absorbable content with gamified methodology, video tutorials, and teacher guides. In parallel, we will implement our servers to enable connectivity and bi-directional communication.These, in conjunction, will create an output of both better equipped schools and higher quality content, at the students pace and level of interest, and higher value propositions toward families. As a short term outcome, we see better school metrics such as attendance, interest, and participation. In turn, medium-term outcomes will be: better prepared students launched into the labor market, tech-savvy teens with an entrepreneurial mindset, and engaged communities with a renewed motivation to have children attend school.

In the longer term, the outcome will be a higher rate of entrepreneurs and job creators within rural communities that have been sources of migration or chronic poverty.

The sum of the previous points becomes of enormous importance today because it opens up new possibilities for students to generate income, employability, and technological and innovative ventures that open up brighter opportunities for them for their futures, better income and lower risk compared to traditional opportunities. In 1bot's theory of change, the role of parents is also integrated because many times they are the ones who have the decision to continue their children's studies, in our vision of systemic change we seek to change the mentality of parents with respect to the return on investment and the continuity of their children's studies and thus encourage them to continue and avoid early desertion for work or even irregular migration. Allowing them to continue with their studies in an asynchronous and flexible way as shown in our operations during 2021.

We rely on two key technologies to bring about a differentiation in our approach to reaching remote learning for the 21st century. Specifically, our local intranet servers and our open-source education platform. 

ADA are our intranet servers made with 3D printing and Raspberry Pi, that are locally installed, allowing us to deploy connectivity to schools and users. These servers store the entire educational and multimedia library. They are continually updated with ease, creating a bi-directional communication with the student. The servers create a channel that allows us to immediately distribute any new content, exercise, notification, etc. to the beneficiaries, thus removing the important hurdles of dealing with physical resources such as books or printed works. 

When in range of the ADA, the content is synced with the platform to have up-to-date data. Thanks to this feature, students can generate insights into our dashboard in an almost real-time manner. Also, each time students come in range, all their exercises and multimedia tutorials are downloaded, so that they can access them at any time. Allowing the platform to continue working offline, when students go home or are commuting, asynchronous learning can happen. Learning can happen anywhere and anytime, at the rhythm that students require, and without imposing restrictions on learning environments. We have seen data on children login into the platform and completing exercises at 5 am. To the benefit of the program, it is this same platform that can allow us to generate reports on progress, challenges, interests, and more of each individual user. Contrasting these against benchmarks can provide a solid foundation for constant improvement while also serving as a tool to audit the work being performed by teachers, students, and ourselves. 

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We have incorporated several elements into our content strategy to tropicalize technology to our geography. We have a standing grant by Le Fil to incorporate gender-inclusive elements into our narrative. We have created content that invites girls to participate and lead within the classroom with great success. Also, we have hired a local artist to develop artwork that highlights the mayan heritage and culture. With this, we aim to localize motifs and themes to fit into local heritage. We have translated our content into Mam, the most popular mayan language in rural Guatemala, to reach children and their parents in the language they are most comfortable with. This lowers barriers to curiosity and interest in technology. We hosted a competition in the city, where a school of all-mayan girls got 3rd place (which was the first visit to the city from the highlands). Lastly, we are developing with Universidad Francisco Marroquín case studies on successful entrepreneurs from Guatemala to showcase the potential of starting a business -as opposed to showing foreign businesspeople to whom they have nothing in common with. 

Our 1-for-1 program allows us to co-finance public schools through programs with private schools, thus leveling and closing the gap between rural and urban schools. We sell STEAM and entrepreneurship modules to schools as a plug-and-play solution, bypassing the need to hire highly qualified and scarce teachers. In turn, as each STEAM kit completes one year at the school, we transfer these kits and hardware to less privileged schools, allowing us to co-sponsor that element of the program together with the private school, thus only charging a small fee to create, manage and support the public school and its teachers in delivering the content in class. 

Within the program, we deliver continually updated content, an educational platform with individual users for each student and teacher, intranet servers for remote schools and open-source robotic kits. Alternatively, we can deliver the exact same robotics kit in a virtualized format. This lowers the cost and eliminates physical barriers to acquiring them, but with the caveat that digital formats cannot be donated to public schools at year-end. 

As part of our cost structure beyond inventory cost, we have personnel who create content on a daily basis to keep children engaged. Periodically, we pay Universities to develop our curricula for a new module such as entrepreneurship or STEAM. Lastly, we develop in-house our servers and print them on a 3D printer. These costs are ongoing as we are continually seeking to create new solutions. As we engage with clients, our current average profit margin on private schools is 50%. For public schools, our economics are similar because we sponsor the inventory but lower the cost to make it accessible.

We have achieved sustainability in 2021. This was achieved through contracts with schools, foundations and a development bank. We have received only two grants, one from Louis Vuitton and another from Le Fil Consulting. We do not receive donations as of yet and we have not raised capital. We have a loan outstanding but a fraction of our turnover for 2022.

Our business model is working and we are growing our staff, office space and investing in new inventory.