Growing Learning Opportunities Worldwide (GLOW)

Unlocking potential by connecting economically disadvantaged youth to curated online learning tools and role models for workforce readiness

Today’s youth need to be more connected to survive and thrive. Economically disadvantaged youth especially lack access to the skills needed to succeed in the 21st century. With uneven access to quality teaching and learning environments, these students face a greater risk of falling behind academically and being underprepared for the workforce, especially during COVID-19. Furthermore, without access to economic opportunities and skills to make informed choices for their future - these students face an increased risk of being trafficked when searching for job opportunities. Pacific Links Foundation’s online learning platform, GLOW (Growing Learning Opportunities Worldwide), leverages technology to empower students with the knowledge, skills, and opportunities to invest in themselves for improved, safer economic opportunities in today’s world. GLOW especially supports students to build their self-study habits, digital fluency, visual literacy, and English proficiency. It incorporates AI to give learners personalized feedback to improve their English. 

GLOW is a unique online learning platform developed using Moodle, a free and open-source learning management system. GLOW was specifically designed to reach the most disadvantaged communities in remote areas with limited access to technology. GLOW is currently being successfully piloted in Vietnam with 2,500+ learners annually and can be scaled throughout the country and replicated and localized for other countries. Throughout our 20+ years of direct experience working with youth, we have learned that increased access to education and safe employment effectively prevents human trafficking and forced labor.

Remote learning remains out of reach for at least 500 million students (UN 2020). With the resulting school closures from Covid-19, 90% of students were out of school (UN 2020), reversing years of progress in education and exacerbating inequalities within education. The transition to online schooling has revealed the drastic digital divide between higher-income and low-income communities. Furthermore, girls from the poorest families have a higher chance of dropping out of school than boys (44% of girls versus 34% of boys from 10-19). 

GLOW was specifically designed for under-resourced youth from remote areas to access culturally relevant resources to invest in themselves through self-awareness, self-learning, and role models to improve their workforce readiness skills for improved, safer economic prospects. 

GLOW is also a part of our education portfolio to prevent forced labor and human trafficking - a $150 billion industry in illegal profits, enslaving over 40 million people (ILO 2017). Consequently, in developing countries like Vietnam, with large populations of migrant workers, victims are often tricked into modern slavery by false job promises. GLOW addresses the root causes of trafficking, including poor education and job prospects, gender inequality, and marginalization.

Our target population is economically disadvantaged youth from developing countries like Vietnam. Although there are numerous learning management systems, they are often inaccessible to low-income students in remote areas. The 2,500+ students we are piloting GLOW with annually are among the poorest of the poor. They often do not have access to the Internet, nor are they familiar with online self-learning. We invest in disadvantaged students to improve their economic prospects by bridging the inequitable, remote learning environments to keep them in school and help them succeed. Even after being supplied with the equipment and Internet access, students often need support to build their digital literacy to utilize most online learning resources, which our team offers through video conferencing and various interactive features.

GLOW is specifically designed for disadvantaged students to overcome barriers and lack of resources in their families, schools, and communities by connecting them with culturally relevant content, educational resources, and role models they would otherwise not have access to. GLOW encourages students to self-learn and realizes their potential to advance independently while increasing their digital and visual literacy. Feedback from users is vital to the growth and success of GLOW - in fact, the decision to expand GLOW was based on the expressed desire from students for more English learning, life skills, and career exploration opportunities. The platform hosts English learning tools and tutoring, workforce preparedness workshops, mentorship, specialized life skills, STEM and career exploration camps, and online courses.

GLOW promotes digital inclusion and empowers disadvantaged middle and high school students to develop valuable 21st-century skills through upskilling opportunities and equipping students with relevant and culturally appropriate information. We are committed to student growth, especially for low-income youth most vulnerable to being trafficked. GLOW is uniquely crafted with the under-resourced student in mind, introducing learners to online learning in an accessible manner and bringing global educational resources to remote areas to increase digital fluency, visual literacy, and English proficiency. Pacific Links Foundation currently provides 2,500+ middle and high school students access to online learning through GLOW across Vietnam each year.

Diep Vuong - President of Pacific Links Foundation

GLOW brings online learning to underserved communities that have been unable to utilize online learning before. Oftentimes, this is due to a lack of knowledge on how to use such a platform and underestimating the value of online learning. GLOW’s interface is designed to be fully accessible for mobile and tablet users, catering to Vietnam’s high smartphone penetration rate (53% in rural areas). For our students who have limited means to access the Internet and little experience with online self-learning, GLOW empowers youth to successfully take the initial leap into online learning and equipping them with the tools to realize their potential to self-learn beyond the classroom.

Pacific Links Foundation launched GLOW in 2017. Since then, GLOW has been deployed across the remote areas of 13 Mekong Delta and Central provinces in Vietnam, reaching 2,500+ disadvantaged students annually, 80% of whom are girls, in our academic scholarship and empowerment programs. 

GLOW has hosted 70+ 1.5 hour workshops, 20+ self-guided courses, 4 specialized camps (two 3-day life skills and career exploration camp with 270+ 75-minute workshops, two 2-day STEM camps), and 2 learning days (1 focusing on STEM and another on English). 96% of students shared that they found the workshops helpful. 

More than 18,000 hours have been spent by students self-learning English. 51% of students have improved their English grade point average (GPA). 40% of students have improved their English GPA by 0.9 points (on a 10 point scale).

GLOW was developed using Moodle, a free and open-source learning management system written in PHP. We also integrated several AI English learning tools, including a speech recognition API, an essay writing API, and a grammar API. We will continue to integrate additional AI English learning tools into GLOW to provide personalized feedback to students in a scalable and sustainable manner so more students can self-study to improve their English.

Adapted from 4-H’s evidence-based approach for positive youth development, we believe that at the individual level, disadvantaged youth will need to be equipped with new knowledge, self-awareness, life skills, and networking & opportunities to develop into a competent, capable, connected, and confident individual that can access further education and economic opportunities with increased self-sufficiency. Activities to achieve this include workshops for skills development and career exploration, online English tutoring, and mentorship hosted on GLOW. This past year alone, 51% of students have improved their English grades, and 96% have shared how useful the workshops are. At the firm level, using McKinsey’s “influence model” framework, we believe that teachers will need to role model, foster understanding and conviction, develop skills, and reinforce with formal mechanisms to strengthen their capacity to improve access to online learning for students. Activities to achieve this include training for teachers and access to GLOW to host their own online courses.

Pacific Links Foundation tracks the number of hours each student spends on GLOW. Each time a student logs in, the length of time on the platform and what the student accesses are recorded. Attendance is also taken during workshops to verify participation. Students submit a form each month to track the number of hours spent self-learning outside of GLOW. Students take a placement assessment before starting self-guided English courses and receiving online English tutoring. The self-learning courses include quizzes to check the students’ understanding. Students also complete evaluation/feedback surveys and participate in focus groups to reflect on how they have benefited and areas for improvement. 

The schools provide students' academic results to Pacific Links Foundation at the end of each semester to track progress.

Indicators include: 

• Number of benefiting youth especially girls 

• Number of students participating in camps and learning days

• Number of workshop topics presented to students

• Number of students participating in self-guided courses

• Number of students receiving online tutoring

• Number of teachers receiving training

• Number of students participating in workforce readiness workshops

• Percentage of students improving their English proficiency level

• Percentage of students improving their academic results 

• Percentage of students accessing further education 

• Percentage of students accessing safe employment with livable wages

GLOW was designed to transform the lives of disadvantaged youth, especially girls, by giving them the chance to uplift themselves and their families out of poverty, away from the risks of forced labor and human trafficking. GLOW’s overall impact goal is to provide youth with the opportunities to invest in themselves by improving self-awareness, self-study, and 21st-century skills to enhance their ability to access higher education and better economic opportunities for future success. This includes investing in teachers to improve the supply of qualified teachers. 

Next year, we aim to continue increasing workforce readiness training opportunities for disadvantaged youth by expanding GLOW features to better serve the existing population and building in opportunities to monetize GLOW while developing our business model to reach hundreds of thousands of students in Vietnam. This will include training for teachers to facilitate their own online learning courses on GLOW. 

In the next three years, our focus will be on leveraging our existing programs and partnerships to scale impact by bringing access to 100,000+ additional Vietnamese students in the 130+ schools we are already working with. We will also further develop partnerships with key stakeholders to bring GLOW throughout the country. 

In the next five years, we aim to replicate GLOW in developing countries, especially developing countries, by building partnerships with the government, public, and private sectors to localize content.

• Short-term

  • Covid-19 Pandemic - Supply chain disruptions have made tablets (with 3G connectivity using a SIM card) to access online learning more expensive. We will continue building partnerships to seek in-kind support from manufacturers and seek funding opportunities to mitigate the increased costs. 

• Long-term

  • Technology - Internet penetration in Vietnam is expected to increase to 75% by the end of 2023 (Statista). Vietnam's smartphone penetration rate is high (estimated by Statista to increase to 48% by 2023 due to the increased affordability of smartphones), although many disadvantaged students continue to lack devices to access the Internet. Our team will continue to promote digital inclusion through distributing tablets and data access for lower-income students. Our funding model includes charging a fee to higher-income students and ad referrals to sustainably equip lower-income students with the necessary equipment to learn online. 

  • Financing - Financial support is needed to more effectively scale and replicate our solution to reach a wider audience. Our strategic plan is to further develop partnerships with key stakeholders to roll out GLOW to their community. We will leverage our existing network and programs to deepen relationships.

Pacific Links Foundation is an organization founded by refugees who dreamed of a safer future for disadvantaged communities. Diep Vuong, Co-Founder and President of Pacific Links Foundation believed she would die at sea at age 16 as a refugee. While she was among the lucky few to build a new life in America through education, Diep decided to return to Vietnam decades later to do what she could, imagining a world where women and youth could unlock their full potential and become change leaders, free from human trafficking - one of the greatest threats impeding the development of Vietnam. Diep co-founded Pacific Links Foundation in 2001 and grew it into one of the leading youth and women empowerment NGOs working to prevent trafficking in Vietnam. One key way to prevent trafficking is access to education and economic opportunities, especially the skills needed to thrive in an increasingly globalized world. In the future, we aim to scale our proven workforce development solutions, such as GLOW, to reach more vulnerable students through the innovative use of technology for maximum impact. Today, we work in Vietnam as well as throughout Europe and Asia to empower women and youth through our successful initiatives such as large-scale educational and skills development programs for youth, training for factory workers and managers, PAXU (workers’ well-being and growth mobile app), migrant women’s leadership groups, reintegration services for trafficking survivors, and capacity building for frontline responders. Since 2001, we have transformed the lives of 150,000+ people.

9 full-time staff are currently working part-time on the GLOW team.

Pacific Links Foundation has 20+ years of experience empowering women and youth in a culturally competent context. Our innovative and successful evidence-based solutions have served 150,000+ at-risk students and trafficking survivors. Our direct grassroots experience in Vietnam and 2019 research report, Precarious Journeys, about the risks and trends of trafficking from Vietnam to the UK provides essential insight into what is most needed to prevent trafficking and forced labor in the supply chain. Over the years, we have built a diverse global network in the public and private sectors to build capacity while incorporating technology to scale our reach. We are a women-led nonprofit organization with a majority women team that collectively brings decades of experience in women’s empowerment, poverty alleviation, counter-trafficking, and social work. Our team’s familiarity with Vietnamese culture and our immersion in Silicon Valley culture enhance our programming with innovative technology. We draw from the resources available in our organization’s Silicon Valley home base and the Vietnamese heritage shared by our team and the communities we serve. Our solutions are informed by our beneficiaries and are specifically designed to address their unique needs. These solutions leverage our existing initiatives to systematically and sustainably scale impact to serve at-risk women and youth, including our education and skill-building programs for disadvantaged middle and high school students.

Pacific Links Foundation’s solutions have always been informed by beneficiary voices and are designed to address their unique needs. For the last five years, Diep Vuong has pivoted our work to harness technology to invest in those most impoverished and at risk of being trafficked to maximize impact. COVID-19 has accelerated the need for our recipients to be digitally connected to leapfrog the barriers in their resource-poor communities. With COVID-19 school closures throughout Vietnam starting in January 2020, we saw the critical need for our students to connect on a digital platform to survive and thrive. When students were out of school, we asked those with a laptop/tablet and Internet to spend every day learning English through GLOW. By March 2020, they had improved so drastically that we decided to shift boot-strap limited resources to build our platform and provide access to more students. The platform increases students' ability to self-study and connects users to tutors, mentors, and industry experts to build knowledge and skills. What is most amazing is that our students have come to realize their potential to advance on their own.

We currently partner with 130+ schools throughout Vietnam for student selection and support to engage with GLOW. 

The Octava Social Innovation Challenge will enable Pacific Links Foundation to accelerate GLOW'saccelerate GLOW’s impact and invest in disadvantaged youth, connecting them with the resources and building the necessary skills to thrive in the 21st century. Furthermore, improving disadvantaged youth’s prospects for better job opportunities will also help us prevent modern-day slavery. The MIT Solve community is a unique opportunity to access multi-sector experts with a wide range of experience within corporate, nonprofit, research, and more, and can connect us with future partners. This community will enable us to scale our impact for disadvantaged learners beyond our current pool of scholarship students in Vietnam. Our 20+ years of direct experience with 150,000+ at-risk youth and trafficking survivors at the grassroots in Vietnam has provided essential insight into what is most needed to succeed in the 21st century and ensure educational success for all.

Our partnership goals are centered around how we can monetize and effectively scale GLOW to learners worldwide. We a specifically looking for the following support: 

• A business model including the development of a strategic plan and business plan to monetize GLOW 

• Financial to develop a pitch to potential investors 

• Network connections to further develop partnerships with the government (including schools) and private sector in Vietnam as well as those around the world who would be interested in bringing GLOW to their country 

• Monitoring & Evaluation to fully capture our impact and feedback from learners to improve their GLOW experience and improve retention  

• Technology to expand GLOW features based on feedback from learners, including integrations of additional API to personalize and gamify the experience for learners, to improve learning outcomes and retention of users