Writing my story

The problem we are working to solve is the low access women have to secondary education in Ciudad Bolívar, a low-income neighborhood of Bogotá, Colombia. 52% of the teenage girls in this Locality are not enrolled in any formal education (Veeduría Distrital, 2019). The factors that are contributing to this issue are a vicious circle of poverty, early childbearing, patriarchal gender roles, and few educational and economic opportunities (Sperling, Winthrop, & Kwauk, 2016). For this reason, we are creating a prototype of a free non-formal digital educational training that will teach students about gender violence and inequalities while they are learning reading and writing skills. Our solution can positively change lives on a global scale because it could be developed from any place and by any teenager in the world and will improve her knowledge about gender inequality and her reading and writing skills.

We are working to solve low access women have to secondary education in Ciudad Bolívar. In 2018, Ciudad Bolívar had a rate of enrollment in secondary formal education for women of 48,5% (Alcaldía de Bogotá, 2018). Globally, this rate was of 66,2% (World Bank, 2020). Furthermore, the current pandemic is aggravating this situation as 335 women are infected in this Locality (Bogotá.gov.co, 2020).

The factors that are contributing to this issue are a vicious circle of poverty, early childbearing, patriarchal gender roles, and few educational and economic opportunities (Sperling et al., 2016). Our solution can tackle all of these factors. As it will be a free course, girls would access it at any time they need it. During the course, we will also teach sexual and reproductive health in a more individualized method and trough creative methodologies for women to learn about it through their reading and writing assignments. Finally, patriarchal gender roles are also related to girls' school drop-out as families tend to prioritize boys' education rather than girls'. For this reason, the content of the course will be focused on girls and boys will be able to access the course if they want. 

Our solution is a digital training on reading and writing skills for teenage girls. The training is uploaded in a free digital platform that anyone can access and start the course. It presents general learning sessions that participants can access and which provide specific exercises for girls to develop individually and then receive feedback from tutors. For this aim, we are allied with a popular film school in Ciudad Bolivar called Ojo al Sancocho that will promote the course in their community. Specifically, we want to teach them creative writing abilities for them to develop their scripts and make them into films with the support of Ojo al Sancocho. Even though they have been training to be actresses, they also want to learn how to write their scripts. We will also provide other sources for girls that want to make their writing into stories or comics. We have developed a prototype of what this digital training can be and have started testing it with the members of our organization. 

The direct target population that we want to support are the teenage girls in Ciudad Bolivar. We have visited their neighborhood and get to know some of the students and the documentaries where they have acted on. Furthermore, we have started a conversation with one of the leaders of the popular film school and to co-create the training. Ojo al Sancocho wanted to start a workshop on scriptwriting about gender violence and inequality but they could not do it because of the pandemic. Therefore, we want to support them in developing this online training that teenagers can develop in these circumstances. We have identified that sexual and reproductive health should be one of the main topics around the course because teenage pregnancy has become frequent in this community. However, we also want to develop a digital workshop with the students to understand better their needs and interest and involve them in the final prototype of the course. Overall, this training will allow them to learn something new that will help them start writing their scripts and also let off steam about their negative experiences regarding gender they have lived. 

The Challenge we are looking to tackle is marginalized girls' and young women's lack of access to quality learning opportunities. The selected dimension is the increment of the number of girls and women participating in non-formal learning. Our solution is to provide them a non-formal training where while learning reading and writing abilities, they can share their stories about how gender inequality have impacted their lives. 

Our solution is unique because it combines different methodologies that have been proved to be successful in other projects. For instance, it is community-based. The NGO Pathram in India implemented a community remedial education program with young women from the community as teachers of basic literacy and numeracy skills that increased students´ learning (Banerjee, Cole, Duflo, & Linden, 2007). Our solution aims to provide a similar methodology as it was born based on the necessities that Ojo al Sancocho identified after years of working with this population. Secondly, our solution aims to teach hard skills drawing on students´ backgrounds and experiences. Using this interactive teaching strategy has been found effective for teacher education in developing countries (Westbrook, Durrani, Brown, & Orr, 2013). Thirdly, our training will teach about gender inequality and our team of tutors has been working on this topic for over two years. Unterhalter and Heslop (2012) have found, “teacher qualifications and engagement with gender equality is a necessary condition for enhancing education rights for all children”. Lastly, our solution wants to provide support for not only the teenagers but also their parents on this pandemic. “In emergencies, education is a key psychosocial intervention: it provides a safe and stable environment for learners and restores a sense of normalcy, dignity and hope by offering structured, appropriate and supportive activities” (UN IASC Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergencies).

Our solution uses a learning platform to teach writing abilities to low-income girls and women in Bogotá. We are building a course of 5 modules that gives girls and young women the tools to express themselves on different media (short stories, comics, movies, etc.). The platform is built to be used on desktop and mobile devices, it supports various formats (videos, PDFs, surveys, quizzes, among others) and the content is downloadable. Using the available options on Thinkific, each module will have interactive content that will allow girls and women to improve their writing. By the end, our goal is for each student to have a draft of a story that they will be able to transform into a comic, a short film, or a book.

There are different products than using the same technology that we will use. Because of the pandemic, all of the schools in the world had to migrate their on-site classes to online classes. For this aim, they have used different platforms and strategies such as Zoom. Nonetheless, for non-formal education on hard skills, we want to teach Might writers at Home is an example of how this technology works. They are a non-profit organization that trains children and teenagers to think and write with clarity for free at 8 low-income locations of Philadelphia, USA. Since the sanitary emergency, they have developed online workshops and they succeeded. However, as we want to develop an online course where participants can access the lessons and develop their exercises asynchronously, we will use a digital platform that allows this kind of experience. The platform is called Thinkific and it is one of the most impactful and effective in the world. There are more than 40,000 courses and more than 50 million students from 160 countries around the world. This is a platform that, definitely, has served the education of many people. Furthermore, it has helped entrepreneurs and students get an education that, otherwise, it would be very difficult to obtain. Recent research has highlighted the effectiveness of Thinkific as a platform for disseminating educational content and develop communities.

The teenage girls in Ciudad Bolivar need the education to succeed. Non-formal education can support them to succeed as they will be more empowered and they will have a better quality of life. For instance, as they improve their education they also enhance their empowerment becoming better able to make and implement decisions and choices (The World Bank, 2014). Also learning reading and writing abilities will help them create their scripts and this will result in receiving improving their self-worth. Better education has also been linked with a better quality of life as it increases economic growth (Sperling et al., 2016). Also, letting off steam about their experiences of gender inequality will improve their mental health, enhancing also their quality of life.  

Our solution is not serving people currently as we are developing the prototype of the training. Once we finished this prototype, we will develop a Pilot of six months with the 35 teenagers that are part of Ojo al Sancocho. After this Pilot, we will survey the students about how useful and helpful was the course for them. If we found out it was successful, we will promote the training through a “snowball” strategy and social media. For the former, we will ask former students to share their experiences with friends and family that would be interested in the course. Regarding the last one, we will design social media pieces to promote the training for girls and women in Ciudad Bolivar. According to our success, we will increase the number of tutors and students. 

Although the theoretic aspect of the course can be accessed for free by any person that registers to the course, the number of individually tutored students depends on the number of tutors we have. Therefore, our goal within the next year is to have 70 students individually tutored (2 groups of 35 students per semester). For the next years, we will like to train other people on how to be tutors. Approximately we will want to train 5 tutors per year which means in the fifth year we will have trained 25 people to be tutors. In this sense, our goal within the next five years is to have 1050 students that have taken the 6 months training and have been individually tutored.

The barriers currently exist for us to accomplish our goals in the next year are primarily financial. Even though the platform we will use will be for free, we still have to develop the workshop with the students to know better their interest, couple our Prototype with this new information, develop the promotion of the course and pay the 4 tutors for their time during the development of the course. The barriers within the next five years are similar. We will need financial support to train other people for becoming tutors each year and to continue individual tutoring. Concerning technical barriers, our team is experts on different topics that together sum up to the different abilities needed for this training. However, each team-member lacks technic in some aspects. 

For instance, regarding financial barriers, we will keep on applying to grants that support digital training for girls and teenagers. We will also start to involve the local government and look for funds that they can release to support this idea. Concerning the technical barriers, we have two plans. Firstly, we will develop a guideline for each of the topics for all the tutors. Each of the team-members will write the guideline on the subject they are experts on. The guideline will have the following topics: pedagogy, writing, gender, and psychology. This will be part of the development of the course. 

The solution team will have 4 people from Despacio and 1 from Ojo al Sancocho.

Despacio is an NGO that has been working in different cities of Latin America for 9 years towards improving the quality of life in cities. We have worked with teenagers in different projects such as CARMA where we train young people in road safety funded by the European Commission and Vivo mi Calle in which we are promoting healthier lifestyles for low-income girls and boys in Cali, funded by BOTNAR Foundation. We are also involved in other projects with Women in Motion (WiM) such as the digital Leadership Program Urban Leaders: mobility and gender in Latin America in which we will digitally train women in leadership, gender, and mobility. Furthermore, we have XX publications about different topics regarding the quality of life in sustainable cities.

In Despacio, our primary solution team is formed by a team of experts on different topics that are related to this project. For instance, our writing expert will lead the reading and writing skills aspect of the project. Our gender expert will lead the gender violence and inequality framework and the psychologist and conflict resolution expert will lead the part where girls let of steam about their own experiences.

Moreover, Ojo al Sancocho has been training these young people for the last 4 years, knows their particular context, interests, and problems. They also have experts on scriptwriting and have developed different documentaries where the Locality´s problems are brought in the script. They have also developed a specific workshop with women on improving their technological skills. 

Ojo al Sancocho as the link with the community

Our business model is based on two features: teaching reading and writing skills and provide them a safe space for them to let off their personal stories about gender violence and inequality. Both services are provided in the digital platform which we have assured they have access to. For this purpose, the exercises of the course will be a way for them to write about their life. Nowadays, 3 of the 17 female students of Ojo al Sancocho are either pregnant or already young mothers. Therefore, they had to drop school. This training will be useful for them because they will be able to access this knowledge and acquire new skills that they are missing because of their motherhood. They will also be able to tell their own stories as young mothers. Writing about difficult experiences can help unburden negative feelings about it and improve mental health. The rest of the students will also write about their own experiences. 

To develop the Pilot we will fund our work through grants. However, later on, we have considered inviting students from the last semesters of university careers such as literature, philosophy, among others to become tutors after we have trained them. This business model has been successful for other NGOs that teach math to low-income children in Bogota called Con Las Manos. For them, volunteers from different colleges have been trained to teach children math. We could use the same model for our training, training college students to become tutors. This will allow us to have less expenses and become more sustainable. 

We are applying to Solve because it is a platform that not only supports us economically to develop our Pilot but also allow us to build partnerships with other organizations and experts that will help us bring the best training for these teenage girls. Also, the fact that Solve is allied with other grants offers is appealing for us, specifically the Innovation for Women Prize. We are also applying for this Prize and winning it will allow us to impact more teenagers as we could be able to hire more tutors. As funding is our most significant barrier, Solver Funding and Innovation for Women Prize will help us overcome it.