Fundaciòn El Origen

Fundaciòn El Origen is a Colombian-based organization that is committed to  facilitating access to quality complementary, vocational, and STEAM education for underrepresented and vulnerable children in Colombia, Latin America and worldwide. Our mandate started in 2015 in La Guajira, Colombia, with the aim to strengthen early childhood education, in particular providing kids with the tools and mentoring to develop digital, vocational, 21st century, and socio-emotional skills. Our methodology also consists in mentoring and giving support to rural teachers, community leaders, and families to engage students in all aspects of quality education, while enriching their human and technical capacities to follow and stimulate students to the best of their ability. In each remote community in which we operate, we thrive to provide a safe space, both within and outside the school environment, where children can develop their educational interests and put them into practice. 

Our work is powered by our own-developed technology, O-lab-app. Tailor-made on a child from the Wayuu indigenous community of La Guajira with no digital skills or background, O-lab app is our inclusive, easy-to-use, accessible, and fully-customizable web/mobile learning platform. The key advantage of O-lab app is the offline function, allowing students to continue classes virtually even where there is no connection. This feature has allowed our organization to be very helpful for schools during the Covid-19 crisis, as teachers could digitize their courses on our platform and retain children in education; while parents were able to follow their kids in taking the digital classes at home through their devices, being the platform downloadable on every low-cost, basic devices through Play Store.

We are currently carrying out education and training programs through O-lab across Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Nigeria, South Africa, Pakistan.

Tania Rosas is a social leader, young entrepreneur, and a true passion-driven innovator. At a very young age, she brought his ideas to life to change access to education in her home region, the complex area of the indigenous La Guajira, Colombia, with the highest level of illiteracy countrywide. CEO of the O-lab app and Co-founder of Origin Learning Fund, since 2015 she has been transforming the perspective with which vulnerable kids and adolescent can pursue quality education and cultivate vocations so as to empower themselves through the development of those 21st century skills required by the modern world. 

Tania Overviews and Guides the Research & Development, Graphic, Design & User Experience, Commercial & Marketing, and Planning departments.

The key feature of our project is its personalized approach. We started working for the community, La Guajira – Colombia, in which our CEO and organization were born. Therefore, we understand the importance of locally built solutions and we have always prioritized our collaboration and partnerships with community-led organizations. Every new step to succeed with our project is done tactfully considering culture, personal biases, institutional practices, and community needs. We incorporate culturally responsive evaluation that considers views and experiences of students, teachers, parents, and Indigenous leaders, with respect to the effect of the projects. Through community focus groups and case studies, we analyze how the perception of culture, heritage, and roles in educational processes has changed. Supporting this, we conduct surveys and assessments to measure the improvement and understanding in schools through our O-lab data analytics platform which produces quantitative results like school reports examining basic learning rights, 21st-century abilities, and socio-emotional competencies.

O-lab: world-first platform for illiterate, unskilled, impaired, and underrepresented children to access quality education, accelerate learning and unlock soft skills.

Children in rural areas in Colombia are more likely to leave school early than students in urban areas. On average, rural children receive 5.5 years of primary/secondary education, while children from towns and cities are in school for 9.2 years. Consequently, illiteracy rates among children aged between 6-15 are almost four times higher in rural areas, 12.5% compared to 3.3% in urban areas.  

The pandemic has complicated the situation. Many children, with already complicated backgrounds behind them, with the closure of schools and the lack of means and resources to continue their education virtually, are suffering from a serious lack of inclusion, engagement, and follow-up of educational activities. And in the worst, and unfortunately many, cases, students have not returned to schools due to the financial inadequacy of families and the inability of schools to commit to bringing children back to the school environment. The most affected of the outbreak are girls, who, without the protection of the school environment, are often victims of early labor, domestic and gender violence, and from 11 to 12 years old also victims of child prostitution. 

Our project will focus on the “indigenous capital” of Colombia, La Guajira, at the border with Venezuela. A complex region with among the highest levels of illiteracy nationwide. Less than 29% of kids from primary and secondary school finish their education. 

According to a report by UNESCO, there are 258 million children and youth that do not attend school, and 617 million children and adolescents cannot read or do basic math.

O-lab app is:

• Adaptable to any content, community, context, audience, and language, indigenous tongues included. Our virtual tutores are designed by our team reflecting the physical and emotional characteristics of our young beneficiaries and trainers.

• A Community Management System (CMS) allowing teachers, community leaders, local allies, and more generally any person without a technical background, to create a wide variety of dynamic, interactive, and audio-visual learning experiences tailored to the students’ needs and interests. 

• A Monitoring, Learning, and Evaluation system designed to collect relevant data according to personalized projects’ indicators, measure students and teachers' performance/progress in the learning and mentoring process and create/disseminate impact reports. 

• A digital space for mentoring teachers, community leaders, public officials and parents of pupils to know how to use the platform, create new content themselves, monitor the progress of the children, know how to assess technical and social-emotional skills, and consequently strengthen their own digital skills. 

• AI-powered content management to create training programs 3x faster. Daily bite-sized content, animations, and interactive tests can help retain up to 80% of what is learned. With an integrated no-code web and mobile app to engage with final users all in one place, O-Lab is perfect for all types of learning path and need.
  

Educators, carers, trainers, community leaders, indigenous youth.

Formative Research. 

La Guajira is the indigenous heart of Colombia on the border with Venezuela and the westernmost point of South America. It is literally a desert overlooking the sea. As rich in raw materials as it is plundered for its resources, the region is among the poorest in Latin America, with the highest illiteracy rate and unemployment in the country. 

How can all these young people living in extremely tough situations, without the resources, underrepresented, get out of this cycle of poverty? To access knowledge and cultivate their talents like their peers in countries where study and work are accessible rights for all? Finding an answer and a solution becomes our mission to start transforming.

O-lab was created to address this problem and to create an alternative educational model with a strong digital component that invests in the real fact that mobile penetration even in less represented areas is now high and allows children and teachers to use O-lab to build an education, even offline, and train the new generations. Before launching our solution and creating the design we have conducted exhaustive qualitative surveys, needs assessment and an information ecosystem assessment involving rural schools, grassroots organizations, and local institutions in La Guajira to better frame the needs of our future beneficiaires and take into account cultural, social and economic, and institutional biases. Whenever we kick-off a new pilot project, as it happened in Nigeria, Pakistan, or Mexico, we always make sure to involve our local partners in the designation of the courses to be created on O-lab and assess with them the needs of the beneficiaries/community impacted with digital courses. Origin Learning Fund does not directly manage the courses on O-lab and guide the young people in the educational process, but we let teachers or community leaders follow the students on O-lab, once we have trained them in the use of the application. We monitor that the educational process takes place correctly. 

Psychosocial Testing:

Sampling over 1000 youth (55% male, 45% female aged between 5-15) in terms of geographic location, 95.3% are located in rural and dispersed areas, compared to 4.7% in urban areas. Regarding internet access, we found that 61.7% have internet connectivity compared to 38.7% who do not have connectivity. Furthermore, we found that 71% have at least one common connection point in their territory. 58.5% reported having a mobile device for their own use, and only 17% have a computer at home. With regard to the use of technology and the time spent on it, it was found that participants spend large amounts of time on their mobile phones. According to the pedagogical use they make of it, 44.3% use office tools. 

All of the participants state that they know how to read and write, they are institutionalised and show interest in continuing their training in other skills or knowledge. Of the areas of knowledge, we found that Basic sciences (29.3%), entrepreneurship (28.3%), digital literacy (11.5%) and human development (10.4%) are the most interesting, while Environment (8.4%), sustainable energy (6.6%) and learning to read and write (5.5%) are less popular.

Main areas of desired learning

-Science
-Technology
-Biology
-Engineering
-Art
-Mathematics
-Digital skills
-Business ideas
-Tourism
-Psycho-emotional skills

These findings allowed us to build O-lab on the following criteria:

Scalability, Adaptability, intuitiveness, Personalization, Accessibility, and Inclusivity, Engagement. 

O-lab is now available to over 15 thousands youth across 9 countries, among more than 10 projects and solid strategic alliances with rural schools, universities, companies and actors in international cooperation and development. 

We are now determined to strengthen our method to detect and highlight the causal relationship between evidence and impact, a key component that still penalises us. In particular, we would like the LEAP programme to strengthen our system of monitoring and highlighting results, which to date has been based on: 

• O-lab Analytics: our Monitor, Evaluation and Learning app system (described more in-depth in the next question)

• Pre and Post operating environment analysis

• Weekly on the ground Monitoring Visits and qualitative assessment (surveys, interviews, ecosystem information assessment)

In our education-tech projects we have often used the following indicators to assess (through trainers test/homework’s evaluation) the evidence/impact of our project on the beneficiaries involved

• Basic Learning Rights

• Socio-Emotional Cross-Sectional Competencies

• Basic Cross-Sectional Competencies

• 21st Century Digital Competencies

We would like LEAP Fellows to help us answer and validate the following research question: 

How can we test and make more effective and empirically robust our alternative education system aimed at unrepresented children and young people, which includes a strong digital component, so that our results are comparable to an institutional education or that it actually fills in the young people with those gaps caused by the absence of quality education? 

Deliverables as outputs:

• First of all, we would like to review with you our action plans and the goals we have set for the short and long term, and consult with you to see whether we can re-evaluate our strategy or continue on the path we have set. 

• We need your managerial expertise to define objectives and milestones that we can realistically achieve in the short and medium term. We will need your help to validate and advise on SMART and SWOT realistic analysis.These lessons will be key for us in order to develop future fund/alliance proposals more in line with our stretch and capabilities.

• We want to improve our ability to convey a stronger connection to the evidence of our results and impact. That is why we are looking for mentors who can help us improve our MEL system with more effective indicators and how to gather key information for our project. 

We are applying for this opportunity because we are convinced that your leading expertise in refining innovative solutions can strengthen our team’s capacity-building and provide the right mentoring to achieve our goal of scaling up our project to 30 countries and reaching 200,000 direct beneficiaries in the next five years. We also believe that your network and connections offering, together with your research and entrepreneurial long-standing expertise, is instrumental to build key partnerships to expand strategically our activities in areas of our interest and share best practices with young innovators working on similar challenges. As a team of young, passionate innovators we firmly believe in the potentiality and further enforceability of our project, but we are looking for senior mentoring and strategic advice from your cross-sectoral experts’ community to guide and inspire us in our search for market opportunities and recommend tailor-made support.

we will involve 1,000 primary school students in a digital inclusive complementary education curriculum powered through our O-lab app technology and tailored mentorship in La Guajira, Colombia, in the municipalities of Riohacha, Manaure, Maicao. In particular, the focus of the education programme will be on these topics:

• STEAM

• Vocational Education

• Socio-emotional Learning

O-lab app does not aim at replacing the role of schools and teachers, rather our activities reinforce existing courses and incentivize students through a dynamic and interactive methodology. The digital courses on O-lab app will be held for two and a half hours per week and will complement the more related subjects. The IT teachers will be our point of reference for structuring the STEAM and vocational content, which will be very dynamic, practical and focused on sustainability and community needs. Based on successful past experiences in similar projects, following an initial theoretical part, students will be guided via O-lab app in the creation of small projects, from making an LED lamp to planting hydro cultures. We will supply the schools with the necessary materials using mostly recyclable resources. Thanks to the experience of the teachers, we will generate every two months new cycles of 4 courses to be digitized on the platform. These will be realized through bimonthly diagnostics that will be submitted to the students via O-lab app to understand which topics to elaborate for the successive content round. Our child psychology specialist will create the social-emotional development content, aimed at strengthening relationships between children, teachers, and parents. The courses will mainly focus on metacognition (self-awareness, emotional regulation), empathy (healthier relationships), critical thinking (real-life problem solving, effective communication). Schoolchildren will access digital courses, also offline, on the O-lab app via devices (tablets) that we have already delivered to schools in past projects. 

Direct beneficiaries of the project are 1000 primary education children from indigenous, migrant, Afro-descendants, natural-disasters affected, rural, and low-income communities. Given the high number of students belonging to the major indigenous ethnic group of La Guajira, all the digital contents will have audio-video/textual translations in Wayuu, the indigenous tongue of the region. The nature of the programme is fully inclusive and accessible to everyone. Being aware that a small part of the students involved have hearing discapacities, and based on our expertise and past successful experiences, we will integrate sign language to part of the STEAM/Vocational/Socio-Emotional courses. Our indirect beneficiaries are parents and family members who will be able to follow children via O-lab app at home. 

Local allies

• 5 public rural schools (200 primary education students each)

• 2 reference teachers per school creating courses and diagnostics on O-lab and monitoring/reporting students’ progress

• Regional university tutores who will help with conducting the diagnostics, supporting the teachers in the creation of the laboratories, coordinate the delivery of devices, material, and weekly monitoring visits to the schools

Objective: fostering learning recovery and acceleration, incentivizing students’ participation and interest in education, building their STEAM, vocational, and socio-emotional skills, and increasing retention rate among vulnerable children through a dynamic and interactive digital/mentoring complementary educational approach.

Outputs

1. Creation of 4 digital laboratories and diagnostics every two months for a period of 14 months 

2. Training of 20 teachers in the use of O-lab app and digital skills

3. Distribution of 50 tablets and material for creating projects with the guidance of O-lab app among 5 rural schools

4. Creation and dissemination of 2 comprehensive impact reports

Outcomes

1. At least 80% of beneficiaries completed the programme, increased their engagement at school and improved STEAM, Vocational, and Socio-Emotional skills

2. Trained teachers successfully enrolled 1000 students in O-lab app, created laboratories on the platform by themselves, and taught the entire programme during school hours. Most importantly, they can ensure the sustainability of the project, now being able to register new classes of pupils on the O-lab app and independently create new laboratory cycles.

3. The students acquired digital skills, many of them for the first time, and applied their practical skills to implement vocational projects. This method, which combines digital teaching with practicality during classroom dynamics, made learning more interactive and motivating for the pupils, promoting acceleration and recovery of learning. 

4. Findings released from the reports are disseminated among local and regional government bodies, and key actors in the development of education in Colombia to shed light on the issues to be innovated or maintained in primary education. Through the results, we can explore the potential of exporting this methodology to the national territory.