Entrepreneurs Academy

It's no secret that the quality of education differs from country to country, from the privileged to the underprivileged. At times there may be equal opportunities but without equity, these opportunities could drastically fail. This is not only about differences in the quality of education. By speaking to 18,000 teenagers', through surveys and interviews, we discovered that children in schools, even in the 21st century, are not being adequately prepared for life after school.  

There is a significant gap between how schools prepare kids and the demands of the real world. Many children are unable to find their passion, and the lack of focus on personal fulfillment is leading to a rise in dropout rates worldwide. Kids are dropping out or losing interest because they don't feel engaged with the subject matter, or they feel like they're not making an impact.  

 In a study by ChildFund India, 64 % of the children expressed that they may drop out if not provided additional educational support as of November 2021. Another survey conducted in South Africa by the National Income Dynamic Study - Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey(NIDS-CRAM) revealed the school dropout rate tripled from 230000 to 750000 in May 2021.  

 Poverty, refugee crisis, and the covid pandemic have further accelerated the number of dropouts.  UNICEF estimates that 48.5 million children worldwide are missing school because of wars and conflicts. Dharmendra Pradhan, India's Education Minister, stated in August 2021 that the pandemic has forced nearly 150 million children out of school. Similar dropout rates were reported by the Unified District Information System for Education, and the National Right to Education Forum's policy brief stated that 10 million girls were at risk of dropping out. Our solution strives to address these crises.

To address this problem, we at the School of Future created Entrepreneurs Academy, a one-of-a-kind curriculum. Entrepreneurs Academy (EA) is an all-online program for students who feel a disconnect from their schools, bridging the skills gap to make them self-reliant in the real world. In 100 days, EA enables a student to become an entrepreneur. Being a founder is not just about getting rich fast: it is a valuable pedagogical journey. We framed it as an exercise in learning durable skills from problem identification to solution invention and marketing, all of which are important skills for future survival and thriving. Students learn how to recognize and control their emotions, work with peers, create prototypes, conduct user interviews, solve complicated problems, become financially literate, and develop empathy, among other things.

EA is based on an unorthodox approach to learning. We believe in learning by doing and our unique pedagogical approach facilitates learning through a combination of self-learning, peer learning, and expert mentoring.

Self Learning: Students consume content in digestible chunks or “mini-skills” on our platform/website that help them master a topic at their own pace.

Peer learning: Students learn in a small cohort of 18-20 Students, filled with peers from at least 5-8 different countries. We host gamified contests once a week, to help students build on one another’s ideas, test one another’s prototypes, and to discover more about their peers. Students can even follow and “invest” (coins) in one another’s business ideas.  They can interact with students of other cohorts and alumni, thereby building a strong community with high network effects.

Expert mentoring: Students get 30 minutes of coaching every two weeks from a trained facilitator that helps them grow and customize their business idea. Not only that, but special emphasis is given to addressing stress management and wellbeing.

Every child entering EA is unique and by the end of their 100-day journey, they have created a one-of-a-kind solution for a problem they deeply care about. This program teaches children durable skills such as entrepreneurship, critical thinking, growth mindset, communication, empathy, collaboration, self-awareness, empowering others, accountability, adaptability, and most importantly, this program creates solvers who take on critical issues in the world. We work on skills and mindset, with individuals and communities. 

Our target population is students aged 10 to 19 years. They are school-going children who feel a disconnect between themselves and what they learn at school. The school education they attend is experienced like a factory where every student is being taught and groomed in the same way. Many drop out of school because they do not feel a connection to the subject they learn and those who do manage to complete it, come out of school as an army of young energetic people who do not have the skills to flourish in the real world. 

The young population that we serve is the most energetic and neglected age group. They often find themselves lost as to who they are, what path to follow, and how to discover themselves. They also face issues like peer pressure, not being able to make good friends, not being able to find ‘their people’. 

 Our solution changes that. The Entrepreneur’s Academy:

• Provides all children with an equal opportunity to learn and develop durable human skills essential for survival in the real world. To support children in all circumstances we invite some students to do the course pro-bono and with financial aid up to 75%. 

• Provides children with a safe space that helps them boost confidence and helps them believe in themselves and their ideas.

• The EA community of students is diverse and accepting of differences, creating a supportive and empowering environment for students. 

• Teaches children durable skills such as entrepreneurship, critical thinking, growth mindset, communication, empathy, collaboration, self-awareness, empowering others, accountability, and adaptability.

• Increased focus and emotional thinking among children help them be focused on their academics and thereby reducing school dropouts.

• Most importantly creates solvers that this world desperately needs.

• The EA to date has served 700+ students ranging from underprivileged to refugees to middle-class children from over 40+ counties.

• 60 % of the children graduating through EA are girls, which is unique for entrepreneurship-focused programs. The visibility of our female-founders and female-led teams, combined with a female-friendly curriculum, are strong incentives for young women to join and complete. 

We are particularly keen to empower the underserved children from countries like India and South Africa, by helping them future-proof themselves by becoming self-aware and apt with entrepreneurial skills. Furthermore, various factors, like poverty or the refugee situation, influences the type of education a child receives and their drop-out rate - offering those children an education that has meaning for them, and will help them long term, is a key driver for us. 

Female founders Aditi Agrawal, CEO, and founder, and Kelsey Root, Co-founder, established School of Future from the bottom up. Because they were both teachers, they were acutely aware of the demands and improvements that were required in the educational system.  and they created Entrepreneur's Academy, a curriculum that meets the future needs of growth and survival for young brains. 

 Aditi and Kelsey shared the same core values, work ethics, and passion for a better education system for all that they connected instantly. After a few months of working together remotely, Kelsey moved from the US to India in February 2019 and the duo has been working thoroughly on the cause since then.

 They've assembled a team, primarily made up of women, who are entirely committed to their mission and to delivering better education and learning opportunities to all students, regardless of their background. The team consists of six members of which five are women. 

The SoF team so far have:

• Interacted with over 18,000 children of ages 10 to 19 and has fundamentally understood the needs in this space of learning.

• Been constantly talking to parents of the children to understand and improve our program.

• A thriving global community of 8500+ members on Instagram and discord, 4000+ participants (teens who have attended our online survival kit sessions, Expo’s, Interviews etc.)

• Graduated 800+ children as CEO from over 40 countries.

• Reached a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 73 which reflects the quality of our products and services.

We didn't know how big of an impact our solution would have when we started, but as of today we have served 800+ children from 40+ countries, various communities, and ethnicities, from underprivileged children to refugees and we are getting closer to our mission and this wouldn't have been possible without our incredible team.

Here are a handful of the projects our students have worked on: 

1. With her project EmpowerEcon, Armita Hosseini, a 17-year-old, made it to Forbes. She made financial education her purpose when she was young, and considering how many individuals leave school unprepared for the financial realities of the world, she focused on delivering financial education to youth. Link: http://bit.do/fTTUz 

2. Ana Gabriela Santana is a 17-year-old girl. She was featured in a well-known Brazilian publication for her work as co-founder and leader of the Access project, which began in 2020 and delivers accessibility to deaf individuals on online platforms.

https://gamarevista.uol.com.br/pessoas/uma-turma/novos-protagonistas-por-um-mundo-melhor/ 

Project Link: https://projetoaccess.pythonanywhere.com

3. Jyoti Singh Rojariya, the 17-year-old founder of Ally Sapiens, wanted to help disabled people find work. She has already recruited four people with disabilities and has partnered with an NGO called Samadhan to carry out her vision.

Project Link: https://allysapiens-e924e.web.app/ 

4. Ntokozo, the founder of Unconditional, wants to un-trap people from the oppression of internalized racism. For Ntokozo, people around her helped her realize she was feeling Bet doubtful and negative about her own self, because of internalized racism in her home country of South Africa, helping people see internalized racism. 

Project Link: https://unconditionalza.wixsite.com/my-site 

We are constantly striving to improve our product and “Solve” is an incredible opportunity for us to join and learn from a cohort that shares similar values in the 9-month accelerator program. 

For the long-term ambitions of School of Future, joining the network of impact-minded leaders and receiving expert assistance from the world's most accomplished academics and professionals would be extremely advantageous. The guidance will assist us in growing and getting in front of people, developing new branding and marketing tactics, as well as achieving our social and economic goals.

Currently, we have 10,000 + students from South Africa, India, and more countries on the waiting list, waiting to enroll in Entrepreneurs Academy. Due to financial constraints, they have not been able to participate in the program. We being a small team can only accommodate a few people into the course on a pro-bono basis or on scholarships. The financial aid from Solve will help us open more seats and accommodate more deserving students into the program, it would allow us to sponsor more students and also help us increase our team to accommodate the incoming numbers.

Furthermore, the funds will allow us to try out fresh initiatives with a wider range of audiences, allowing us to increase our client base (Product Distribution). Currently, one of our hurdles is finding a cost-effective way to generate leads. We have a conversion rate of 7%, in a sector where the average hovers around 2% - but the cost of lead generation exceeds our income from the program. One avenue we are looking to develop is a referral/word-of-mouth program, building on the high satisfaction we received from our alumni. For this, we will explore different models - family-based, neighborhood-based, workplace-based, and centered on the students or their parents. The funding will allow us to conduct the testing. 

More generally, exposure and added legitimacy from the program will be beneficial, in a sector where the quality of education offered is not directly perceptible to prospective students. 

The most difficult yet most critical element of an education program is its capacity to tailor curriculum and activities based on the users' learning pace and thought process.  This is a major difficulty for brick and mortar schools, due to time limits, over-paced and extensive curricula and the high pupil to teacher ratio. The difficulty tends to be even more acute in countries with fewer resources. In India, the UNESCO reports that the pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) at senior secondary schools is 47:1 as against 26:1 of the overall school system and similar figures are reported in developing countries. This is also a difficulty for digital ventures, as online learning can become tedious when students have no other motivation than to pass an exam, complete some sort of online quiz, or simply read texts and watch videos. More generally, the majority of platforms offer templated digital content that fails to meet the individual needs of each learner.

 Our solution was created with the understanding that everyone learns differently and has varied intake capacity. Our solution moves with the requirements and comprehension of the child in order to give them durable skills irrespective of the geography the child is from. In order to teach durable skills the most innovative aspect in our pedagogy, and the one that was most challenging to achieve, was finding the perfect balance of self-learning, peer-learning and expert mentoring, and providing a learning experience that was global by design, which other platforms fail to realize. 

Our main program, Entrepreneurs Academy, is a 100-day program. Over the course of the program, students go through a complete entrepreneurial journey, at the end of which they find themselves founder and CEO of a world-changing solution. Students are free to choose the problem they want to work on, and guided in that choice by self discovery and passion. They follow a guided design thinking process to develop their ideas, and receive 1-on-1 customised coaching by a personal mentor. This way, our solution trains students to become active problem-solvers. During this journey, the students learn to identify and manage their emotions, collaborate with peers, build prototypes, conduct user interviews, solve complex problems, become financially literate, develop empathy, and other critical 21st century skills. Our program makes all this happen online.

Students feel excited and gain a sense of belonging as a result of our approach and involvement of a supportive peer community, which keeps them coming back throughout the 100 days. Even after they graduate, we have student alumni actively participating in student projects and assisting new students with enthusiasm.

Here are some of the highlights of how we've improved our pedagogical approach significantly:

1. We offer a unique blend of online learning with offline hands-on learning. The webapp provides students with actionable steps at each point and they get to experiment in the real world. For instance, in the module on design thinking, users venture into the real world, survey people, and find customer pain points. 

1. Every student gets one on one attention and guidance by an expert mentor during the course of this program. Mentors are selected on the basis of relevant expertise, enthusiasm for sharing that expertise, eagerness to invest in others, feedback capabilities, honesty, integrity, reflective listening and empathy. Every two weeks, the mentor spends 30 minutes with each student, allowing them to have a bird's eye view of their projects and guiding them in the right direction. To ensure the quality of mentor experience, we focus particularly on training the mentors at regular intervals throughout their journey at School of Future. 

1. The students are engaged for 100 days, for an average of 4 hours/week. The time frame was strategically designed such that it does not interfere with the traditional schooling of a pupil and to allow the programme to be used as an extracurricular activity.

2. We are a global product, which  brings diversity to our user base, enhances peer learning, and encourages students to take up global problems. Our peer-learning approach means that students engage with other students in their cohort who live around the world every day/week/month. Our engagement methodology is designed to address linguistic and cultural barriers by fostering a more inclusive atmosphere.  With community support, we try to create a safe space for children who aren’t native English speakers where they feel like they can ask for clarification and keep their point of view without being ridiculed. Community building activities that help them walk in each others’ shoes are carried out on a regular basis. Not only is our cohort global, but socially diverse. This way, students can learn across class boundaries which brings a greater diversity of perspectives, and appreciation for inclusiveness.

 Since we ran the first iteration of Entrepreneurs Academy in 2019, we have had students who worked on solving discrimination, racism, lack of mental health awareness, and other critical issues in the world. EA has proven to be a catalyst in creating a community that is composed of doers and go-getters, thereby inspiring other students to do the same. Word-of-mouth referral has gotten us this far and when we achieve a critical scale, the community's network effects will be enormous in terms  of empowering teeangers and setting out a chain reaction that creates a society led by empowered young people, and where education models inspired by our work become adapted by traditional learning institutions to close  the skill gap, valued by individuals,  employers and institutions.

SOF’s impact can be articulated in these distinct strands: 

Impact on the young people participating in our program: 

Young people acquire critical 21st century skills that allow them to make better judgment and reach opportunities over the course of their entire lifetime. Based on our work so far, we believe EA has the potential to instill long-lasting skills, such as entrepreneurial capacity, critical thinking, growth mindset, accountability, adaptability, communication, empowerment of others, and empathy, in children of ages 10yrs to 19 yrs. Those skills are particularly critical, as they tend to be the ones least developed in formal education, and the most developed through informal, family connections. As such, by teaching them in a formal course, we aim to fight against entrenched class distinction and provide kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds with skills to thrive in life, that are typically the preserve of children from more privileged backgrounds.

Impact on the communities surrounding young participants: 

As participants learn skills, they become more able to empower others and create conditions of greater affluence for those surrounding them. This includes greater capacity to build community, including with other participants in their cohorts. For students of refugee background, this means greater capacity to rebuild community as they relocate. Here is an example of the work Atifa- a refugee student has done   https://atifanaif13.wixsite.com/educationsbrighthope

Impact on the education sector globally: 

Our program, through its success, will shift perceptions and narratives of what quality digital education looks like. The intended result is a shift in curriculum, pedagogical practices, policy and funding available. Part of this impact is directly led by our participants, some of whom are creating companies and organisations in this space. 

Our impact directly scales with the number of participants involved in our programs. We know from our work up to date with Entrepreneurs Academy that our program works pedagogically. Our focus will be clearly on scaling our numbers. For this, we will focus on two areas. 

 Market growth:

Over the course of its existence, SoF has interacted with over 18,000 teenagers. We have a lively community of 8000+ youth on Instagram and Discord, and we have graduated over 800 students from the Entrepreneurs Academy.

In 2023, we want to raise this number to 40,000, 20,000, and 10,000, respectively. Similarly, by 2027, we want to have multiplied by ten, i.e. 400,000, 200,000, and 100,000.

Entering Parallel Markets: 

Our ambitious, long-term goal is to transform the way young people learn, around the world. For this, we want to demonstrate the feasibility of high quality, personalised digital education, developing skills that will allow young people to succeed in life after school. Beyond scaling EA to reach a wider cohort, we are looking to develop additional programs that have the same quality and standards, but targeted at a broader audience and communities. 

 Next in the pipeline, we have International School for Children, a program for children from ages 4 to 12. Training this cohort is essential, as it offers a greater capacity to reach kids in formative years, and instill a mindset that can have cumulative benefits over the years.  International Schools in India and all over the world are considered prestigious - and are expensive - so that only privileged children get to experience and learn from this environment. With International School for Children we aim to change that and provide access to world-class education to children from across socio-economic sectors, at an affordable price point. We plan to launch the program within a year and scale it to a massive standpoint by 2027.

 Visibility and narrative: 

• Going ahead we would like to build a strong foothold among teenagers by increasing our visibility and reach. One of the main reasons why we are applying to MIT Solve is to interact with brilliant minds at MIT and engage with individuals and organisations whose goals align with ours. 

• We are looking to shift the narrative about young people, presenting them as the catalysts for change and engines of prosperity, resulting in more attention, respect and funding for the social solutions that they build.

• We are hoping to change the narrative about the prospects of digital education and use of technology in education, leading to policy and funding changes in the field.

We have created a Future readiness index that helps us track the growth of our impact goals. This index is centered on the learning and growth of our participants. The KPI (Key Performance Indicators) are as follows:

1. Active users: The percentage of users active during the duration of the program. (75%- 100%)

2. Graduation Rates: The percentage of students who graduate in a cohort. (75%-100%)

3. Course Success Rates: Monitor completion rates on a course. (>75%))

4. Student Retention: 75% and above retention rate determines the success

5. Student Outcomes: 

• Keeping a track of students after graduation to see where their learned skills have taken them and their performance in school before & after completion of the Entrepreneur’s Academy. 

• EA helps impart durable skills and the students take their passion from zero to one by working on a solution for the problem they are most passionate about. Once they graduate, some students continue to work on their projects or branch out with the skills they have learned. The application of the learned ability in real life, regardless of the solution they worked on, is the qualitative metric here.

• After six months, 20% of students continue with their project ideas, 10% after a year, 50% branch out and apply what they've learned, and the remaining 20% emphasize college and further education.

 6. Satisfaction and functionality: The level of satisfaction among students is 73% and more. As per the attained Net Promoter Score (NPS).

 7. Students On Aid: This metric calculates the number of students receiving financial assistance/ scholarships via School of Future.

The following are the long-term outcomes we aim to reach:

• Closing the skill gap: Teens participating in the program have greater lifetime opportunities, as a result of the skills gained in the program. We hope to contribute to closing the global skill gap by improving employability and cross-functional skills. Individuals, workers, communities, and countries as a whole will benefit in the long run as a result of this. According to the World Economic Forum, addressing the global skills gap may boost global GDP by $11.5 trillion by 2028.

• Create youth-led solutions to local problems, improving social and economic outcomes locally. 

• Shift the narrative on the role that young people can play in solving social and economic issues, leading to greater attention, respect and funding available for youth-led initiatives. 

• Shift the narrative about the possibilities of digital education, leading to change in policy and funding for digital education. This would be a shift to the current situation, where most education funding is directed by state to state-based, or local-based brick-and-mortar institutions.  

The following are the mid-term results:

• Re-engage participating students in learning, lowering the incidence of school dropouts, by assisting them in identifying their passions.

• Students gain valuable experience and develop durable skills, such as emotional intelligence, empathy and a sense of community, with immediate outcomes on their capacity to join e.g. better university courses, and/or generate income to support them through their studies. 

• Students leave with a business in 100 days becoming founders and entrepreneurs. 

The Short-term outcomes are as follows: 

• Students complete platform work on time

• Attend online sessions with cohorts to build a sense of community

• One on one mentoring helps them customize learning.

The core technology that powers our solution is our unique learner-centric pedagogy. 

Learning is facilitated by a combination of self-learning, peer learning, and professional mentoring using different technology tools. 

1. Web App: Students absorb knowledge on our app in digestible chunks or "mini-skills" that help them master a topic at their own speed.  At the core of our pedagogy is action-focused, directed activities that the students conduct in the world. Their work on the app, primes them with questions, before they go out and try something in real life. In addition, we give students access to supplementary resources - video, audio, and text - to contextualise their practice. Those resources are selected on the basis of fun and engagement to make them most exciting and accessible. 

2. Gamified Contests with Cohort using Zoom: Students are taught in small groups of 18-20 students, with peers from at least 5-8 countries. Once a week, we hold gamified contests that utilise different online tools such as discord, meme creation, post creation, online gaming platforms etc to encourage students to build on one another's ideas, test one another's prototypes, and learn more about their peers all from the comfort of their home via video conferencing apps like Zoom.

3. Website builders/ App builders/ AI technologies: Students during the course use different technologies to build their prototypes and trial it on potential users. Marvel, Wix, Webflow, Bubble are some of the etc.

4. Grit Coins on Web App: Students can follow other's business ideas and "invest" (coins) in them. This ‘investment’ model extends beyond the present cohort. This is the main channel through which we allow students to interact across cohorts. We have used bubble to build this platform. Bubble is a JSON-based declarative language for web application assembly. Bubble has helped us combine hand-coded javascript modules seamlessly into a working node.js application to meet our goal of buidling a strong networking community.

5. Online professional mentoring: Students receive 30 minutes of expert mentorship every two weeks from a professional facilitator to help them expand and customize their business idea. This is online-based and hence has no geographical boundaries. In the start of the new cohort our expert mentors make accessible time slots available for students to arrange calls. Once booked, this time slot is fixed and continues to be so until the end of the program. Making it easy for both the student and the mentor to maintain a convenient schedule irrespective of the country of residence. Tools like Google Calendar, Calendly, and Zoom greatly assist us in accomplishing our goals.

We serve a global audience that is diverse not only in terms of geography, but also in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and religion. We have created a global community of teenagers who are accepting and supportive of one another. This community would not have been possible without the help of our incredible team. Our team has included people of various genders, religions, and races from countries such as Spain, Canada, the United States, and India over the years. We also encourage people from a variety of academic and professional backgrounds to join us and contribute their exceptional vision to the team. Our current team members come from finance, training, product development, teaching, research, and public policy