E-Learning for Coffeeland Kids

Education is the single-most influential investment to break out of poverty.Yet, millions of children living in remote coffee-growing communities worldwide never have this opportunity. 88% of school-aged children in coffee growing communities in Nicaragua where we work cannot read at grade level. Girls fair the worst, with especially high dropout rates between elementary and secondary school. 

Based on Teaching at The Right Level methodology, our Community Allies Program has improved literacy and school attendance in 40 coffeeland communities to date. We designed our e-learning platform to scale our Community Allies Program to coffeeland communities worldwide. Our solution is an e-learning platform with tailored gender-responsive digital literacy and numeracy content. The software tracks each students' progress, allowing for desegregated data for girls and boys. 

We expect our solution to improve girls’ education in coffeeland communities globally. These educational gains translate into personal well-being, more sustainable farming methods, and broader economic development. 

Millions fo children in coffeeland communities worldwide lack access to a safe and quality education. Our independent assessment in Nicaragua revealed that 31% of second to fourth graders in coffeeland communities did not have a basic knowledge of letters. 

Since 2014, our Community Allies Program, modeled after Pratham's Teaching at Right Level approach, has dramatically improved coffeeland children’s learning outcomes. In 2018, we tried to leverage free digital learning to amplify our impact. We found that available open-source learning materials were ill-suited to improve coffeeland children’s educational outcomes. Gender-responsive materials that incorporate models and scenarios that were relevant to young girls and women in coffeeland communities was missing. 

Girls and young women in coffeeland communities across the globe share many experiences that merit customized digital content to improve their participation and advanced schooling. Education for coffeeland children that reverses entrenched gender norms and promotes educational attainment is key to breaking the cycle of poverty (Hawken, 2017). Every year a child stays in school equates to higher earnings and better educated farmers are more likely to adopt better agricultural practices (Banerjee, Duflo, 2011).

Our solution is an offline e-learning platform designed for students whom education is not reaching. This platform can be easily installed in low-cost tablets. The interactive games and content focus on the priorities we have identified in isolated rural communities: cultivating strong foundational skills (literacy and math), presenting material in interactive and relatable ways, and providing offline access to other educational material in areas where there is no internet. Gender-responsive education underlies our data collection, implementation and content development.  

The platform collects data that instructors can monitor periodically to track student progress, areas of difficulty, or to identify learning disabilities. The data can be disaggregated by gender and assessed at school and department levels to assess effectiveness of certain learning materials and to understand gender-based differences in learning in coffeeland communities. 

Lastly, the platform addresses the lack of instruction and gender-responsive pedagogical materials teachers face in rural regions. The platform has instructional videos and guides on best pedagogical practices to accompany and supplement the materials in the platform.

Since 2014, Project Alianza has provided education that incorporates health, gender-equality and environmental responsibility to more than 5,000 children in rural, isolated coffee-growing communities. Our work dramatically increases literacy and reading comprehension among students and re-integrates at-risk children back into school. We are designing this platform for children who live in isolated, hard to reach coffee-growing communities.

Project Alianza works closely with communities committed to improving their children's educational outcomes. Through participatory research and constant improvement, we identify needs and adapt our educational services to these needs. Our collaborative approach has allowed us to identify the particular needs for education in this context, and the crucial role of tailored digital content in addressing these needs.

Through our partnership with Barrilete, a Central-American education software company, we developed an application that 1) builds foundational literacy and math skills among older children; 2) has content that is relatable and gender-responsive; 3) collects student learning data by gender; and 4) provides effective gender-responsive pedagogical training for teachers. 

Within coffeeland communities, gender norms play a significant and negative role in young girls' participation and school advancement, especially during the transition to high school. The e-learning platform is part of the continuum of educational services in our Community Allies Program. The content in our platform promotes values on gender equality, addresses gender-based violence and will be adaptive to promote young girls' participation in learning. The software will track students' engagement and progress desegregated by sex to provide insights on differential needs and learning for girls and boys. Teachers will be better able to target and help struggling female students. 

Project Alianza’s e-learning platform is part of a continuum of services offered by our Community Allies Program. Our Community Allies Program has shown impressive changes in learning outcomes, reaching 40 communities. 338 students at high to moderate risk of dropping out of school showed measurable improvement in literacy as a result of our services. 

We decided to use digital learning to improve our Community Allies Program’s classroom activities: 

1. Because the Teach at the Right Level is individualized, collecting individual data is key to adapting content to maximize children's learning. 

2. Paper-based activities have no recognition system for achieved activities, which is important to motivate constant interest in learning and to reinforce learning as a habit. 

3. Paper-based content is not gender-responsive so gender-sensitive add-on modules are limited in reversing entrenched gender norms that dissuade girls from completing their primary education. 

When we attempted to use publicly available technology to tackle these issues we found that available content did not quite measure up. 

1. We observed that the educational material required explanation of the facilitator because of the low quality of free content to download and install on tablets.

2. Children consumed the content of a tool in 4 weeks, therefore the search of fresh content month by month was a challenge.

3. The educational material did not respond to the local context.

To fill this gap, we partnered with Barrilete to produce customized free content for coffeeland communities that customizes content to shared experiences among children across the globe living in coffee growing communities.

Our technology is part of a continuum of services provided in our Community Allies Program. The e-learning platform is powered by the following core technology components: 

• Aggregator of existing content, such as videos and readings, that tackle issues of gender-based violence and provide examples of positive gender roles; 
• Mobile application, that is designed to conform to the needs and uses of students in participating in Teach at the Right Level instruction, Project Alianza Monitoring and Evaluation staff, and Community Educators; 
• Customized digital audiovisual materials that embed gender-responsive vocabulary and scenarios in literacy and numeracy activities; 
• Usage tracking of learning outcomes and technological engagement by student so results can be disaggregated for girls and boys. 

Teaching at the Right Level is an evidence-based approach that has improved literacy and numeracy for children in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.  Our Community Allies Program utilizes the Teaching at the Right Level to improve learning outcomes for children in coffeeland communities. Our in-person teaching pedagogy already incorporates key methodological adaptations to improve girls participation, such as allowing students more time to process internally to accommodate for differences in how girls and boys interact in the classroom. 

Mobile apps are widely recognized as effective in engaging children in learning and enriching formal education for literacy and numeracy. Offline customized content is used in MIT Solve’s Tabshoura Tiny Thinkers, which provides free, offline early-education content for vulnerable children in Lebanon. 

Best practices on creating gender-responsive educational initiatives recommend collecting and analyzing data disaggregated by sex in order to understand the differential obstacles and needs for girls and boys. 

First, a continuum of services: Success in tackling the issues of low educational attainment, child labor, and generational poverty on coffee farms requires more than simply ensuring the availability of school. Igniting such change requires a variety of support services (literacy through e-learning, gender-responsive curriculum, support for high risk children) as well as adaptive teaching and training of local teachers.  

 Second, strategic partnerships: A community-driven, collaborative approach propelled by public-private partnerships; Project Alianza engaged in participatory research to understand distinct barriers for girls and boys’ educational attainment; we partnered with experts to understand how entrenched gender norms adversely affect boys and girls educational attainment differently.  

Third, a local model: Project Alianza’s educational services are positioned to enrich, but not replace, formal public educational services in coffeeland communities. Project Alianza exclusively hires local residents to teach and engineer e-learning content. This type of collaboration ensures sustainability and impact in the long-term. Shared experiences among coffee growing communities has enabled us to engage in cross-country training of community educators in El Salvador and Nicaragua by local staff.  

Activities: Hire and train facilitators; develop gender-responsive literacy and math content for mobile applications, including rewards and timing that is responsive for differences in girls’ and boys’ socialized norms for engagement; curate available content to promote non-violence and cognitive well-being and load them on tablets; adapt content and teaching based on data of children’s engagement with technology and learning outcomes disaggregated by sex; 

Outputs: Creation of offline digital gender-responsive content and data tracking by sex; students participate in 50 hours of learning where all modules use gender-responsive content.

Short-term outcomes: girls and boys have parity in technology proficiency; children gain competency in literacy, math and non-violent behavior; children envision options for their future that incorporate educational attainment.   

Long-term outcomes: students demonstrate awareness and sensitivity to negative impacts of gender norms; girls increase their participation through secondary school.

Our Community Allies Programs currently reach 1,600 students in 40 communities in Nicaragua and El Salvador. We expect to incorporate our e-learning platform to amplify our instruction for an additional 800 students in three countries (Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala) by 2022. Of these students, roughly half are girls, meaning that our e-learning technology is expected to contribute to 400 girls' school persistence in 2022. 

In 5 years, we expect the application to be scaled rapidly and serve well over 5,000 students in many countries. While we expect our gender responsive e-learning will benefit outcomes for both boys and girls, our gender responsive e-learning, combined with our in-person pedagogical adaptation for increasing girls' participation and Community Educator modeling for girls to transition to high school, will effectively improve girls' enrollment and persistent by 25 to 50 percent. 

Our goal for next year is to test the digital content of the application in coffee growing communities in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Based on the feedback that we get from students and instructors we will make adjustments and go through a second round of beta testing. Our goal is to create material that is not tied to the curriculum of any particular country, but rather has a strong focus on foundational skills.  In 2022 we plan on widely implementing the use of the e-learning platform among our programs in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador serving around 800-1,000 second to fourth-grade students. In 5 years we will have collected abundant data to continue adjusting the content to increase effectiveness and serve a larger group of students. The application will be made freely available to governments and organizations working in similar, remote contexts.

There are several barriers to accomplishing our goals in the next year and in the next five years, these are: 

1. Remote coffeeland communities are difficult environments for hardware. 
2. Our Community Educators will be first-line users and point persons for software maintenance and troubleshooting. 
3. Although our technology has the capacity to transform millions of children's lives worldwide, it is not a traditionally large market for a successful business model for e-learning content. 
4. Because of Project Alianza's collaborative approach major political or economic crises our can delay our work. 
5. The current pandemic poses unique challenges to testing our technological platform in a student setting. 

Project Alianza plans to overcome these barriers to accomplishing our goals in the next year and in the next five years by: 

1. Using hardware that has been shown to be resilient in rural communities in developing nations. 
2. We are working closely with our software development partners to ensure that major updates and troubleshooting is user friendly and that Community Educators are trained and empowered to maintain software. 
3. Rather than pursue a revenue generating model for the e-learning platform, we are seeking funding from philanthropic communities. 
4. Project Alianza develops close and long-standing partnerships with the communities where we work, for this reason we have been well-positioned to continue our work in spite of political and economic crises. 
5. Our partner, Barrilete, a Central-American developer, is already brainstorming opportunities to safely test our app according to World Health Organization recommendations. 

Our solution incorporates both the design and implementation of our e-learning platform. On the design side we have 4 partners working part-time. On the implementation side we have 4 employees working full time and 14 part time staff who will implement the beta testing.

Our Project Alianza team has been working in remote coffee-growing communities for over 5 years and has intimate knowledge of the needs, dynamics, and potential in neglected rural communities. Our leadership team consists of Kristin Van Busum who lived three years in Nicaragua as a Fulbright Scholar, Camila de la Vega (Harvard Kennedy School candidate) who began as an Education Princeton Fellow with Project Alianza, and immigration expert, Dr. Mariellen Jewers. We have an establish board of directors across industries and sectors. In 5 years of work, the Project Alianza team improved education for over 5,000 students through school constructions, camps for children of migrant laborers, literacy programs, and our pilot digital learning program. 

Aside from access to school, we have learned that the biggest issue in education for remote, rural communities is that children are not reaching minimum third-grade standards in reading and math by the time they graduate from primary school. We know that any step in improving education has to ensure children are acquiring these foundational skills. Our flagship education program is based on the Teaching at the Right Level methodology and we have seen a marked improvement in foundational literacy skills as a result of it. In the regions where we work, the demand for our education program has been continually increasing. We are ready to scale through a digital tool that can accomplish what has made our program successful: assess student needs, provide tailored learning content, and support teachers to better address student needs.

The partnership between Project Alianza and Barrilete brings a combination of strengths in rural education and in education software design. Project Alianza's founder and CEO, Kristin Van Busum, as well as Barrilete's founder and CEO, Urania Callejas, are Central America Leadership Initiative (CALI) Fellows and recognized for bringing innovation to their respective fields. 

The team at Barrilete is helping Project Alianza translate expertise and knowledge of rural education into the design of an e-learning platform. 

Project Alianza is also partnering with Nicaragua's Ministry of Education to improve learning outcomes and support teachers. Once the e-learning application is ready to be scaled, Project Alianza has permission to implement it in rural schools, and collect learning data from those regions to provide a clear picture of learning in remote parts of the country.

Our Market: Project Alianza serves the very specific niche of coffee communities, currently focused in Latin America. We will maintain that strategy through our international expansion to capitalize on our specialized knowledge of engaging with stakeholders in coffeeland communities. 

We provide empowering educational content that improves children’s literacy and numeracy and opens their perceived options for the future. Our value proposition for families is demonstrable reading and math outcomes that justify keeping children in school and out of the fields. Another segment are adult community members who we employ as Community Educators and train in gender responsive pedagogy.  

Our customers include coffee estates and farms that are interested in engaging in corporate social responsibility.

Project Alianza diversifies its revenues from individual donors, corporate sponsors and public/private foundations. By leveraging public-private partnerships, volunteers, local resources and maintaining low administrative overhead, each dollar that Project Alianza receives generates a substantial “social return on investment”. Since our inception in 2014, Project Alianza has seen a yearly increase in annual funding. Annual growth in our budget has always been accompanied with deeper and broader reach to the most vulnerable children in rural Central America. From 2018 to 2019, for one percentage point growth in our annual budget, we increased the number of children we reached by 9 percentage points.

Project Alianza relies on Teaching at the Right Level methodology because of its evidence-based record for positively impacting learning outcomes of students in rural areas of developing countries. We hope to avail ourselves of MIT's network to generate content and implementation that can be subjected and withstand similar rigor for our e-learning platform. 

We intend to scale our work by coffee-growing regions. We would greatly benefit from interacting with other teams focused on regions outside of Latin America to better understand the shared experiences and overlapping needs for girls’ education in coffee-growing communities worldwide.  

Our CEO and Founder, Kristin Van Busum and the founder of our partner Barrilete met as Aspen Institute Fellows and that relationship gave birth to this innovation. We believe that having access to a broad community of innovators and learners through MIT Solve will introduce us to many operational partners, thought partners as well as potential funders that will be instrumental in developing and scaling our e-learning platform. 

For the past five years, Project Alianza has focused on effective implementation and building internal capacity for providing quality education services that further children's learning in coffeeland communities in Nicaragua. As we embark on our efforts to expand our work and scale, we hope to engage with local organizations and experts that can assist us in this phase of our growth.  

We already have gained tremendous guidance from Pratham and, in addition to this continued learning, we like to partner with J-PAL to undertake rigorous evaluation of our e-learning platform.

We also hope to partner with Solve Members that are working on issues related to coffee growing and improving girls' educational opportunities in coffee growing communities as well. 

The GM Prize for Learning for Girls and Women would be a substantial financial support for our launching our e-learning platform and achieving our 2022 goals for reaching 400 girls in coffee-growing communities. 

GM engineers would be particularly helpful in helping us to determine the type of hardware that could withstand difficult environmental situations and wear and tear in a school setting.