Learning Lions

1. The rural and nomadic Turkana (Northern Kenya) has 98 % of its population living in extreme poverty and 95% of the population live on less than $1 a day. Low-productivity agriculture, a lack of context-based education system and high transport costs render this communities vulnerable to persistent extreme poverty.

2. We offer free training in digital vocational skills in order to enable young women and men (partially from refugee backgrounds) to make a living and support their families and communities by selling valuable digital services to international customers - right from their homes in Turkana.

3. If scaled globally, remote communities all over the world would gain access to the global digital economy and acquire the necessary skills to significantly increase their income.

Our project is targeting rural (youth) unemployment with the connected problems of hopelessness, alcoholism, migratory pressures and urbanisation. In the region of our pilot project – Turkana – 97% of people live in extreme poverty, suffering from unemployment caused by poor infrastructure, limited access to markets, very few formal job opportunities. Turkana has particularly infertile soil that does not support sustainable agriculture. Local businesses including basket weaving, mechanical repairs and small kiosks exist, however none of these scale to provide widespread employment opportunities or meaningful wages. Yet, with around 900.000 inhabitants, Turkana holds an untapped potential of human talent with the great advantage of having (formerly unused) internet connection even in some of the most remote areas.

We deliberately chose Turkana for our pilot-project to test our concept against particularly harsh conditions, so that we can replicate it pretty much anywhere in the world, helping to better the lives of the global 800 million rural poor.

The objective of the programme is to make use of the internet access, the available talents, and the rising global demand for digital services to provide economic opportunity.

In general, we offer an education & job program divided into three stages: Learning Lions, Digital Lions and Startup Lions. The first step focuses on selecting and training the young adults in order to provide them with highly valuable ICT skills. Divided in a basic and advanced training, students are trained in graphic design, programming, media production, and web development, etc. After completing their course, they are invited to stay on our ICT campus as trainees of "Digital Lions", our fair-trade IT-outsourcing agency. Here, they first experience working with international customers and gather hands-on business experience. Finally, whenever one of the Lions has a business idea, Startup Lions kicks in. Its role is to offer consulting, access to international networks, capital and co-working spaces as well as access to equipment and markets.

Additionally, we run Kenya´s first fully digital/paperless Girls´ High School where students naturally learn digital literacy skills.

Who (short term): the youth of remote and poor Turkana county and their direct families (including refugees at camp Kakuma). Many of them have never used a laptop before and have zero digital literacy skills.

Who (medium & long term): Our students´ and graduates´ communities (who profit from P2P learning of digital vocational skills), Turkana county as a whole and other poor, remote communities worldwide.

How are they underserved: lack of economic opportunities (because of lack of context-based education and employment opportunities)

Understand their needs: Our managment team comprises of people from Turkana and abroad and we are in constant exchange with our students. We regularly do impact-measurement surveys to even better understand the region´s challenges and our impact on them.

Engaging them: By holacracy decentralised management system, by recruiting management staff exclusively from former graduates of the training program (and thus target community), and by a local cofounder who brings in teaching experience in the region and the necessary cultural
grounding.

We enable (young) people in remote areas to acquire and use high-value digital skills. We ensure independence from location by taking students from whole Turkana, enabling remote learning and providing housing. We provide training, infrastructure, devices, internet access, market access and capital. Our Covid-resilient approach (moved all training online) addresses highschool graduates and refugees. They serve as an avant-garde for digital literacy spilling over to their communities and injecting money into the local economy.

Digital education and jobs lead to increased income and thus open better possibilities for a dignified life. 

After running a 5 year long pilot project in provisional facilities in Lodwar, we have moved to a dedicated ICT campus at the shore of Lake Turkana in 2021. Htere, we have also created a prototype village (including a fully digital/paperless girls' high school, desert farming, a fish factory, etc.). Having trained over 200 students since 2016, we want to scale up our activities through taking in more students and increasing graduates´ income, so they can sustain themselves, their families and cross-finance future cohorts of students. The communities we currently address are all people of Turkana county, including refugees from camp Kakuma (we had multiple mixed local/refugee cohorts). Our new campus is built for scale and will be able to accommodate several hundred students, and we are looking for partners and support to achieve this scaleup!

Learning Lions integrates study and work, offering a context-based
education that can directly be applied. After their training, students
have skills that are demanded on the global market, giving them the
opportunity to actually use their education, gain job experience and
generate revenue. As part of the Digital Lions IT agency, the programme
even provides graduates with employment, and as a final step supports
them to found their own business. Each year, the training is reviewed to most effectively match the skills required on the global market. Digital services thus become a viable income option in Turkana.

This unique blended approach bridges the gap between education and
employment and ensures that dead ends to education are minimized.

Learning Lions´ concept was explicitly created for remote and rural areas. Compared to urban areas, which usually are richer in opportunities, this maximizes added value to students and the community. The project addresses the education bottleneck and doesn´t just tap into existing talent pools. New students are highschool graduates which can start their course without preconditions.

Besides being a non-profit model (far from common), Learning Lions focuses on human-capital intensive and creative skills. Our campus model promotes cooperation, knowledge spillover and offers jobs for less skilled community members and fully runs on renewable energy.

Catalytic: By creating an ICT knowledge pool in Turkana, digital vocational skills can scale beyond Learning Lions´ activities itself through P2P learning.
Replicable in further remote regions, the concept can be scaled beyond Turkana.

Current number of beneficiaries: 200 * 3 (multiplier) = 600

Number of beneficiaries in 1 year: 400 * 3 (multiplier) = 1200

Number of beneficiaries in 5 years: 2000  * 3 (multiplier) = 6000

Our impact measurement team collects data from internal and external sources:

- SMS survey send to ALL graduates regularly (longitudinal)

- online survey for new cohorts to get basic data and to compareprogress against - baseline survey as comparison group

- performance data from training

- income data from Digital Lions

The following KPIs can be used:

- number of girls completing basic digital literacy classes at Wakanda High School

- number of digital literacy trainings held at Wakanda High School

- number of people trained in digital vocational skills

- number of graduates working at Digital Lions or as digital freelancers

- average income (increase) of students after graduation

- net promoter score (graduates recommend program)

Full-time: 10

Part-time: 20

Volunteers: 20

The founding team dedicated substantial own funds, is committed long-term and all have spent time on the ground in Turkana and many other African contexts in private sector and development. Our local director and co-founder Brizan Were is a Turkana by birth; he worked as a teacher in the region previously, giving us great experience and credibility. Ludwig Bayern has 8 years of experience in development projects, including more than six projects in Kenya with a total budget of more than $1m (e.g. orphanage in Turkana and rainwater retention). He is an ICT autodidact and founded his first start-up when 18. Benedikt Wahler, is a renowned strategy consultant on inclusive and digital finance, leading >30 projects that reached >7m previously unbanked and built up the Sub-Saharan business for a top4 global strategy consultancy. This expertise and our approach have attracted other experienced professionals from IT, management, economics and development.

Our founder´s team includes professionals from three different continents and diverse cultural/language backgrounds. Brizan holds multiple Kenyan national prizes for his fight for human rights.

Former (female) students are increasingly taking over responsibility in our organization, both for the Learning Lions program as well as for our Wakanda girls´ high school of digital excellence.

Though the number of female applicants is always lower than the number of male applicants to our program, we strive to run cohorts with 50% women. Our Wakanda high school, fully dedicated to girls, is due to start soon.

The main reason we want to apply for Solve is the networks it can provide.
Solve´s 9-months program will give us access to other people working to
solve similar problems, to increased attention for our solution and to
world-class mentoring and coaching.

It would be amazing what kind of credibility a cooperation with MIT could give our project (both Learning Lions and Wakanda girl´s school) and its graduates in the area of ICT/STEM.

We hope that Solve can help us in the following areas:

Digital eduaction/didactics (which we need for curriculum improvements), sales, marketing and business development (crucial for our goal of raising individual income of our workers), assistance with teaching our students project managment and customer communication (especially important for freelancers) and additional funding (every dollar is gets more Lions trained).

We hope that Solve can connect us with people and experience from those areas. If awareness is raised among MIT students, some might even want to join the project as teaching volunteers for 1-3 months.

Human capital: We need more people with a (digital) education background 1) in our founders team or 2) at least as volunteers. Thus, we need help finding those.

Business model/business development and product/service distribution: we are looking for ways how to further boost the revenues of our graduates. We therefore want to 1) gain new customers/more contracts, 2) eveluate offer/positioning options and 3) improve the management of projects/customers.

In general, strategic support is very welcome. In the past, a consulting firm did valuable pro-bono work for us.

MIT school of engineering and school of science: support with STEM lab at Wakanda girls´ school of digital excellence (planning, training, equipment)

Schwarzman College of Computing: curriculum support, joint projects, participation of selected Lions in online courses, (if possible: Scholarship for top performer of the Learning Lions program)

Besides the advantage of a professional cooperation, the signal effect of cooperating with MIT would be tremendeous.

The Learning Lions program does not only target Kenyan nationals from Turkana but also refugees from nearby Kakuma camp (Turkana borders conflict-laden countries like South Sudan and Uganda). Those are often living in Turkana depending on international aid.

In the past, 50 refugees from Kakuma camp already participated in the program (in mixed classes together with Turkana youth). Assuming a locally common multiplier of 3, 150 family benefited from our program.

We are looking to build a Learning Lions subsidary to our ICT campus, a co-working space at Kakuma camp and include more refugees in our trainings (own refugee classes e.g. directly at the camp, integration in other trainings, etc.)

Learning Lions offers a high-quality education program that trains young Kenyans from poor & remote Turkana in 1) digital vocational skills and 2) advanced ICT skills. Those high-school graduates who did not manage to secure government funding for tertiary education have the chance to acquire valuable context-based skills that enable them to significantly increase their income.

About half of the program participants are girls.

We would use the funding to scale up our teaching activities (train more students -> more graduates) and thus enable more people to earn a sustainable income, ultimately diminishing poverty in Turkana (and beyond).

A central piece of our innovation is a holistic and digitally-enabled approach of economic and social empowerment of girls and women in poverty-stricken rural African regions. It builds on proven concepts of poverty-reduction (Graduation Approach, BRAC) and gender-lens interventions design (soft-skills training,mentoring, childcare provision, health care, education, self-help/organisation, and financial autonomy).We combine these with our unique, award-winning approach for successful digital vocational skillstraining (and subsequent job creation) approach for which we stand, and enhance impact further withoutreach targeting girls in the region. We benefit from lessons accumulated over the past six years. Toour knowledge, this blend of remote settings with poor infrastructure, young women without any previousIT experience, congenial physical set-up in sustainable building standards, marketable skills, and thecreation of state-of-the-art professional opportunities does not have any parallel in Africa.

What we would do with the funding:

- Build and run daycare center for young mothers

- Girls protected living building

- Introduce additional all-female classes to boost the number of female graduates

- Additional funding for the Wakanda Girls´ school scholarship program

- Tech Dada Digital Literacy Courses for Wakanda Girls High School

- Quarterly self-defense & mental empowerment training workshop for women at ICTcampus

Learnin Lions uses an innovative teaching curriculum for ICT skills powered through digital means and runs a STEM-focused digital girls school. Turkana, our area of operation, is shaped by paralyzing poverty, lack of opportunities for the younger generation and a lack of infrastructure. By equipping youth with context-based ICT skills and jobs, their income increases drastically and poverty is mitigated.

The sustainability of the approach (economically and ecologically) is ensured by powering the campus only by solar energy and by providing students with means to reach a higher-income with non-resource-intensive ICT jobs.

We would use the funding to scale up our teaching activities (train more
students -> more graduates) and thus enable more people to earn a
sustainable income, ultimately diminishing poverty in Turkana (and
beyond).