Exsulcoin: A Blockchain Solution for Refugee Education

Exsulcoin uses blockchain and AI to make high-quality education accessible to everyone.

Only 22% of refugee adolescents attend secondary school--compared to 84% of adolescents globally--and only 1% of refugees ever attend university. Yet, high-quality education is the key to breaking cycles of conflict that cause people to flee their homes; indeed, regions with low average rates of education have a 50% chance of experiencing conflict. However, demand for education in countries that shelter refugees is expanding, causing current resources to be stretched unsustainably thin. Exsulcoin solves these challenges by delivering personalized, high-quality education in a way that is scalable, accessible, and open to audit by any accreditation board.

Exsulcoin leverages the widespread adoption of low-cost Android smartphones to deliver culturally-appropriate education content. This content lives on public platforms (e.g., Youtube) and can be audited by anyone for quality. Our Exsul app uses an AI recommendation engine to deliver personalized education to each individual user, so students do not need to follow lesson plans or course curriculua. Additionally, Exsul uses the forward-facing camera of the phone to track user eye-movements, which assures each student has consumed the content as intended. In areas where internet connectivity is poor, education content is delivered through the Exsul app using mesh networking.

User skills assessments are recorded on the Ethereum blockchain using Exsulcoins--an ERC-20 token designed to replace traditional grading. For instance, instead of receiving an A or B in a course, a student receives an A or B token, which is a pre-determined fraction of an Exsulcoin. In this way, student "report cards" are recorded immutably on-chain and can be audited at any time. Moreover, storing these assessments on blockchain makes them portable across jurisdictions, relieving students of having to maintain paper documents, and the distributed nature of Ethereum makes the destruction of these records unlikely. Exsulcoins also serve as a cryptocurrency, which allow students to pay for premium courses while concurrently relieving the need to find work to support their families.

Over time, as students consume more content and perform blockchain-based transactions, we will be able to use their data to generate credit and skills ratings for each individual on the Exsul platform, allowing us to match users to micrometered work opportunities available globally (e.g., "help this other refugee understand this math question"). In this way, we are building a complete pathway, linking education to actual and meaningful work.

Put it another way: If we were blessed with unlimited resources, we would likely hire the world's best teachers in each subject for our children. These teachers would customize lessons to maximize learning, and would accommodate the student's schedule and needs. Never before has this level of personalization been available at scale; however, with the advent of cheap computing power, blockchain, and widespread adoption of Android smartphones, we can now meet--and exceed--this ideal by delivering high-quality personalized education, and then optimize the student's consumption of that content over time, maximizing learning outcomes. This is, simply, the future of education, and it begins right here, right now, with those among us who need it the most.

Exsulcoin is a suite of new and existing technologies, applied in combination to solve the unique challenge of delivering quality education and work opportunities to refugees in severely resourced-deprived contexts. The innovations we have created include: using eye-tracking technology to verify consumption of video content, using blockchain to record academic achievement, using predictive analytics to reduce classroom hours, using mesh networking technology to deliver education content to refugees, and creating the world’s first and only education programs in the Rohingya, Burmese, and Karen languages.

Before the advent of blockchain, cheap computing power, cheap streaming video, and the widespread adoption of mobile smartphones, the solution we're proposing would not have been possible. What we are doing is delivering education content that can be audited for quality, and combining that with skills assessments that are tamper-proof and reliable, to show that a person has met standards of education in a way that is portable and can be adapted to any jurisdiction. We are, essentially, replacing the need for human teachers, and technology is integral to that process.

Exsulcoin, over the next 12 months, seeks to create additional Rohingya language content, specifically: intermediate and advanced English language training, and civic training programs for resettled refugees. We are also creating a full suite of nursery school songs in the Burmese language, for use in both the Burmese and Rohingya communities. For our Exsul education app, we will continue improving our mesh networking technology, and will integrate a payments solution so we can begin delivering premium content to generate revenues.

Our mid-term plan for Rohingya and Burmese content involves developing culturally-specific characters for each community and then, over time, having those characters interact in lessons that teach reasoning and conflict resolution (instead of violence). We believe this content will save the lives of millions of refugees and exiled persons. We will also continue developing characters and education content for other markets, ultimately scaling our education solution to hundreds of millions of people. We believe such scale is important since there are countless other people living in refugee-like contexts, including, for instance, internally-displaced people and stateless populations.

Most people in Myanmar and Bangladesh do not have access to credit cards, so they generally don’t download apps from an app store. Instead, they either upload apps via USB drive connected to their phone, or they use an app that sends the desired app over Bluetooth to another phone. While this high-touch process goes on, we will distribute and grow our userbase on Facebook, which is widely used, using targeted advertising and posting to relevant groups, and then, over time, transition all of our followers to the Exsul app.

We are active and being used in the Kutupalong and Balukhali Rohingya Refugee Camps in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. It is difficult to define accurate numbers, since refugees living in those camps do not download apps through traditional channels. However, field surveys show that refugees living in those camps love the content we are making and want to consume as much of it as possible. Exsulcoin is delivering the first-ever formal academic courses in the Rohingya language; this is especially important for the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who lack access to quality education.

In 12 months, we expect to have one million users consuming our education content, both through our app (via Youtube) and Facebook. The content we deliver is the first and only of its kind, and absolutely essential to basic education.

In 36 months, we expect to serve 200 million people regularly, with highly measurable education outcomes. Specifically, we will have academic records of students who have taken several skills assessments on our platform, and we can compare that against skills assessments given through traditional schools. We expect our platform to deliver clearly superior academic outcomes compared to traditional schooling.

Our team is a group of stone-cold assassins who have endured hacking attacks, persecution, and death threats over the last year to build our technologies. We embody a seriousness-of-purpose defined best by our will to overcome extreme challenges and stop at nothing to succeed. We believe our passion is attractive to exactly the type of people we wish to attract.

We are raising $2mm in a seed round to complete our technologies and initial series of education content. This financing is an 80/20 blend of equity investment and charitable donations, which immediately gives equity investors a 25% return while concurrently offering donors 5x efficacy on their money.

In the next 12 months, we will leverage our education content to attract roughly 2 million regular users to our channels, and then sell sponsorships to appropriate advertisers to expose their brands to these users. We will also create and sell premium (paid) content in the United States, Myanmar, and Thailand. Since some of the free content we are producing fulfills the mission of many non-governmental organizations, we will also apply for financial sponsorships and grants from these organizations.

We are currently prosecuting patents so we may license our technologies, including our eye-tracking technology, which can be used to verify content consumption in (for example) continuing education training used by corporations and professionals.

Finally, the culturally-specific characters we are creating will be monetized through merchandising and sticker sales in relevant markets. We have developed proprietary distribution techniques in the markets we currently serve, and strongly believe we can scale our work effectively.

We are currently a small, agile team focused on delivering best-in-class education to Rohingya, Karen, and Burmese communities living in Myanmar’s border areas. This is incredibly difficult work, often stymied by unforeseen obstacles like obscure administrative approvals or needing to build trust with potential translators over several months. We believe connecting with the SOLVE community is crucial to helping us cut across these obstacles, as well as access the kinds of partnerships and collaborations we need to scale our work.

We can use additional introductions to appropriate investors and donors, as well as assistance attracting highly-capable advisors. In addition, we are currently building a self-sovereign identity solution using the Ethereum blockchain, and would like technical assistance in its development.

Finally, we would like assistance in contacting refugee communities distributed in the United States and Canada so we can locate specific types of talent. This has been a severe pain point for us, since resettled refugees are generally distrustful of relatively unknown organizations like Exsulcoin.