INTERCAMBIO

Education in Colombia, like in most of Latin America, depends on the circumstances of your birth. If you live in a vulnerable rural community, it is unlikely that you will have an education beyond primary school, and probably not a very good one.  The pandemic exacerbated that divide but it also fueled a rise in migration from cities to rural communities.  Middle and upper class Colombians fled the city lockdowns.  In the last six months of 2020, 906,000 took the plunge and 87% were well educated, professional and entrepreneurial individuals. Our solution creates a network that taps into that talent pool and provides rural youth with an opportunity to learn from the new arrivals, focusing on vocational training programs that are relevant to the reality of their environment.  This shift has occurred all over the globe and creating a replicable model is an opportunity to benefit vulnerable rural communities.

The pandemic was an unmitigated disaster for students throughout Colombia and particularly for vulnerable rural communities where education was already more of a privilege than a right.  By March 2020, 53,717 public schools had shut down leaving 9,928,865 students out of school.  A year later only 11.6% of students had returned to class while their families were 60% worse off.  The switch to the virtual classroom did not work.  While 97% of students from private city schools had internet access, only 20.7% of rural communities could count on regular service.  27% of teachers simply gave up and searched for other jobs and even today, 40% of teachers have returned to work but not on a regular basis. The statistics may vary slightly but this situation is common through much of Latin America.  Colombia invests less than USD 1000 annually on students in the public school system.  Even before the pandemic there was a desperate need for solutions.  Our solution will not fix the structural problems of a desperate system, but by turning one of the consequences of the pandemic into an advantage, it could encourage the search for answers to a challenge that is destroying future generations.

There is a wealth of talent, knowledge and experience arriving in some of the most vulnerable municipalities of Colombia.  Our solution taps into that resource to strengthen the capacity of the local, state system of education by creating a network of professionals, artists, entrepreneurs and academics that are resettling from the city, who can provide educational and vocational opportunities that small holder farming families would never have had access to before.  Arrivals from the city want to engage with their new local communities and often have the time to spare and the personal desire to improve the quality of life of those who are now their neighbors.  We create a network and provide training to adapt their skills so that they can provide vocational workshops in a large variety of areas to rural youth.  We look for potential teachers that will broaden the outlook of students and specially for those that can provide skills, experience and knowledge in activities that are directly relevant to the rural environment such as regenerative agriculture, bioconstruction and computer programming. Students can then have the tools to improve the quality of life of their families and make them more eligible in the current jobs market.

In the municipality of Choachi, the pandemic closed all schools and despite being a rural area relatively close to the capital Bogota, internet coverage, particularly for the poorer families does not exceed 21% of rural, mainly small land holder families. 38.4% of such families are led by single mothers who also have to cope with earning less than the minimum wage with little or no time to spare for their children’s education and much less dedicate time to virtual classrooms if they are available.  This reality is common to municipalities throughout rural Colombia and much of Latin America.  

Our businesses, be it the manufacture of organic inputs, bioconstruction or the development of innovative agricultural models depend directly on their involvement and it is obvious that a major barrier to their engagement is their concern for the education of their children.  The gaps in the formal education system were obvious before the pandemic and now they do not even have access to that.  By encouraging the exchange of knowledge, talent and experience with former city dwellers we are opening up horizons and creating opportunities.  

Through hands on experience in the production of organic agricultural inputs we are offering an understanding of the science and the ecological balance of their environment.  Through innovative bioconstruction techniques we are nurturing the development of crafts such as woodwork and the use of recycled goods in a construction boom that serves the new arrivals.  Through work experience in innovative agricultural models we offer experience in digital marketing and market based solutions for artisan products and the growing demand for healthy organic produce.  

Our prototype started 2 years ago. Realizing the large gaps in educational opportunities for our local workers and their children, we set up a school to provide vocational training that made sense with the rural reality of the community.  We found other recent arrivals from the city that were bringing new and useful knowledge to the region.  One started a bioconstruction project using recycled materials to build homes.  Her success led to the training of more than 20 local youth in bioconstruction techniques.  Two years ago she took 10 local workers to China to build one of the most talked about exhibition sites in the World Horticultural Fair held in Beijing.  

Having joined forces, our solution uses the advantages of the most privileged and fortunate to offer rural communities the benefit of their knowledge. In our municipality alone, recent arrivals include a former head economist of the Colombian Central Bank, several famous artists and musicians, the former director of production for Latin America of the food multinational Nestle, leading journalists, architects and entrepeneurs amongst others. Many have already expressed their wishes to become a part of our network.  It offers them an opportunity to improve the lives of the community they now call home. For the rural youth and their families, having lessons and a true exchange of knowledge and experience with people who have chosen to make their community their home is a source of inspiration and an opportunity to learn lessons from real experiences and abilities that are not part of their school curriculum.  This knowledge is tailored to their environment providing avenues that will enable them to stay in their community and not follow the usual path of migrating to the city while building a more resilient environment.

The official school curriculums in Colombia offer little or no vocational training. Rural communities are not given the tools that can allow them to evolve and respond to new market demands in a variety of activities from agriculture to construction, tourism and service industries.  By providing training and a flexible agenda to complement the official school curriculum in a wide range of areas by tapping into the knowledge and experience of arrivals from the city we are helping to prepare rural communities for the challenges they face.

The social consequences of the pandemic are quickly becoming permanent features of our communities.  We started the process of exchanging knowledge and vocational training in different ways 2 years ago but the pandemic has provided a clear opportunity to accelerate the network we are proposing. The large migration of former city dwellers to this region provides the opportunity to create a network and a replicable model that harnesses the abilities and desires of the new arrivals to contribute to the education and provide vocational opportunities and life enriching experiences to rural youth. 

We have made alliances with other stakeholders that have started this process and now want to carry out a census of the new arrivals, create a teaching model according to their availability and design a mechanism where their input complements and enhances the education provided by the local state school system.

Class and economic divisions make Colombia one of the most inequitable countries on Earth with a Gini coefficient of 0.5226, only above Haiti in the Western Hemisphere.  The pandemic has created an opportunity to bring the have and have not´s closer together and allow our model to promote an exchange that was not possible before. For centuries, Latin America has been characterized by rural to urban migration.  Cities provided opportunities and better education while globalization, large scale industrial agriculture and the dependence on expensive agricultural inputs eroded the ability of small land holders to make a living.  This migration starved rural areas from their best talents.  The population got older, less productive and as a result, less influential for national policy makers receiving less resources for basic services like digital coverage, education and health.  The growing interest in healthier lifestyles, away from increasingly polluted and congested cities started a small trend that renewed interest in rural areas but it was the pandemic that turned thousands of city dwellers into new, and very different migrants.  With the new arrivals came some negative impacts such as gentrification and the rise of land prices.  But our solution attempts to draw a positive from the crisis by providing the technology to adapt their knowledge to practical workshops that are useful in a rural environment and help communities become more competitive in the market.

We use a large variety of different technologies to adapt the knowledge and experience of potential teachers to useful vocational training that is applicable in the environment where our students live.  One of the problems of current vocational training is that it offers answers that either rely on outdated technology or technology that is too expensive for application by rural small holders or that it simply does not respond to current market trends in demand.  

Our bioconstruction workshops rely on cheap practical techniques that make the most of advanced structural and engineering theory to use recycled materials to build a wide range of structures.  Our regenerative agriculture workshops provide appropriate technology that adapts biochemical processes to materials that are available and cheaply obtained by local communities.  We encourage programming workshops that rely on easy to understand software that is widely available and that can be applied to the solutions that our students and their families are looking for.  

Beyond using our network of teachers for inspiration, we make sure that their workshops are designed to offer solutions that are both practical and easily applied to the challenges likely to be faced by the local community.  Furthermore, creating a network of teachers requires basic technology that can help us create a solid digital platform that maximizes their investment in time, availability and the needs of the students.

Technologies that we plan to use in our vocational workshops are in common use around the world.  Regenerative agriculture is being widely used and bioconstruction techniques have been developed for the last two decades. There is an increasing body of technology and applications that relate to learning processes and programming skills that we would also be looking to use. We would also look at the conservation of ancestral skills and practices, from the reintroduction of native crop varieties to the adaptation of traditional artisan food production using better methods that make such products more attractive to the market.

The main risk of our model is the adaptation of existing technologies to the reality of vulnerable rural communities with little or no resources.  As we adapt different technologies to make them more accessible or we adapt the knowledge and experience of our teachers to become effective vocational training courses we could run into problems.  Our intention is to use valued education professionals to help us in this process and methods we have already tested in our long running businesses to reduce such risks.

Our current school, the Escuela Rural Sustentable Uta Tagua, has 12 students that include 3 students from the community and 9 from families that settled from the city.  There are currently 2900 students in primary and secondary schools in the municipality of Choachi and 4800 in the region that would have access to our network.

Our network currently has teachers offering training in arts, geography, recycling, the production of organic agricultural inputs, bioconstruction, innovative artisanal food production, applied mathematics,  basic computer programming and languages. 

We aim to carry out a census and program training sessions to develop a varied curriculum with former city dwellers by early 2022 in time for the start of the next academic school year.  By the first year we aim to enroll 50 students in our supporting curriculum. By year five we aim to make our network available to all students in the neighboring region.  Our impact extends beyond the students as it has an effect on their families through empowering individuals enabling them to find jobs and reducing migration to the city.  It also strengthens community bonds with new community members arriving from the city.

A good education is perhaps the most valuable tool in achieving human potential.  Vocational training that adapts to the changing demands of the market is one of the main areas lacking from current school curriculums.  Inspiring teachers that speak from experience and provide real examples of the value of education and the possibilities that it can provide are also a key part of developing curious and engaged students.  Finding a low cost solution that uses current demographic trends as a result of the pandemic is a potential tool that helps to bridge these gaps.  

We have a strong working relationship with municipal authorities that can help to make the most of this initiative by complementing the official school curriculum with the knowledge and experience of new arrivals to the community.  We aim to create a replicable model, starting with a census of available teaching talent, workshops to develop how best to use and transmit this knowledge and even exchange programs where our students can present their experience in city schools and students of city schools can visit our rural areas and share the experience of our students.  We would make this model available to communities experiencing a similar demographic shift, focusing on similar and adjoining regions first, creating a system where all members can take part in the educational process, making the most of their experience and knowledge, impacting the progress of students and improving their quality of life. 

The obvious indicators involve the number of students attending our existing school, those who attend our vocational workshops and the teachers and subjects that we can offer through our network.  

We will also  establish additional indicators that can measure the impact of the program.  For example many of our trainees in bioconstruction have gone on to gainful employment building structures based on the techniques we taught them and all of our artisan food producers have seen a dramatic rise in income.  

We will also be creating measurable indicators through our digital platform, together with the teachers of the official public school system to measure how our parallel activities impact their progress in official schools. 

Full time staff: 4

Part time staff:3 Associated 

staff from our partners:5

We are ideally suited for this solution because our team members are all examples of who we want to recruit for the network we propose and because we have been living in this community for 8 years or more. In an albeit informal way, we have practiced what we preach and have already offered vocational training to dozens of local community members.  Amongst our team there are graduates from NYU in the US, Cambridge University in the UK and the top universities of Colombia.  Having decided to settle in a vulnerable rural community our future is entwined with the well- being of the communities that surround us.  We have a wide variety of professional experiences, from bioconstruction to regenerative agriculture, documentary filmmaking, environmental sciences and even professional restauranteurs.  Our contacts with the new arrivals and the former city dwellers that chose to make this region their new home allow us to effectively encourage participation and our relationship with local government will help align our efforts with the existing education system. We have already started a prototype for our proposed model, a school where some of our own children receive vocational training side by side with local students and we want to use that experience to create a wide ranging and replicable model.

Our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is at the core of the model we propose to build.  Colombian society is sadly dominated by prejudice, chauvinism and what some consider to be an unhealthy reliance on religion.  Official school curriculums do not address the recognition of those problems or offer much to overcome them.  The situation is particularly pronounced in rural communities and our model is built in a way where addressing lack of diversity, inequity and exclusion are key drivers in anything we do and in the design of all the components of our training.  For example we openly encourage the participation of Venezuelan migrants, a growing problem in Colombia as they are rejected and erroneously blamed for many of our own society’s problems.  We look for professionals from all possible backgrounds as their stories of success are a good way of seeing beyond any differences in lifestyle or gender.

Financial resources are always needed but often, who provides that support is just as important or even more so than the support itself.  The reasoning for the 2021 TPrize Challenge fits perfectly with our own vision of the effects of the pandemic and the need to find creative solutions that make the most of the ensuing disaster in education.  We live and see those consequences every day.  To receive the support of what many consider to be the best academic institution in the world would galvanize local support for our model, and have a powerful effect in inspiring former city dwellers who have settled in the region to join the program.  Making the most of the conditions we have been dealt with by the pandemic is a powerful lesson in itself, but the support structure and network made available when chosen for this prize is a way to maximize efforts and get the most out of much needed solutions to generations that are at risk of taking many steps backwards in their development.

Our main need is to carry out a proper census of the available talent in the region and the desire to participate.  Once that is achieved we would work with education professionals to adapt the knowledge into working vocational training courses.  With the offer in place we have every reason to believe that demand would be very high as we have been doing this either through our prototype school or through on hand work training with our partners.  We need human capital to help us adapt the experience of arriving professionals for educational purposes, a business model to ensure sustainability and retaining professionals who join our network, legal and regulatory support to establish an efficient and practical relationship with the official school system, public relations support to effectively communicate what we aim to do and its advantages both to potential teachers and students and technological support to develop the right software for both our digital platform that will house the network of professionals and also the applications that can improve the efficiency of our courses.

There are two main areas that we believe could help in the implementation of our model.  Adapting technology so that its application in the reality of vulnerable rural communities is vital for success.  There are private, public and academic organizations that specialize in this and we would obviously benefit from their experience and know how.  That technology can range from solar powered tools to techniques in regenerative agriculture and basic computer programming for young students.  The second area of expertise we are looking for is in the development of proper educational methods.  Our pool of talent will rarely have experience in vocational training and a large part of our model relies in translating their knowledge and experience into effective teaching tools and methods.