Picadito Digital & Potrero Digital

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown children’s learning into a sharp crisis, but it has also created a systemic opportunity for reimagining how children learn. Unlike any previous point in the history of humankind, we are equipped with the most powerful technologies and tools to become architects of the future of learning.

A vast playground of opportunities is calling for innovative approaches that make learning a fascinating adventure for all children and the youth population. All the way from math adaptive learning programs and gamified language learning apps; to lessons enhanced by Augmented Reality or robotics kits invite children to tinker with technology.

Underprivileged population in Argentina do not have sufficient capital to pay for tertiary education, which perpetuates poverty cycles. In Argentina, there are 16 million people below poverty line (35% of its population) and 52,6% of people under 18 years old are poor (7 million kids). 

The low education standards of the region creates a difficult environment for these individuals to get proper training and skills for the future digital jobs. Six out of ten children and adolescents do not achieve minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. Furthermore, researchers confirm that parents with poor education and informal jobs raise children with lower possibilities to change this paradigm. This is the vicious circle that we aim to break down.

Picadito Digital and Potrero Digital are two programs developed by Fundación Compromiso, an NGO with 28 years of experience generating the articulation between the different actors of civil society. It’s an organization that identifies, co-creates and strengthens strategic civil society projects that have a high social, cultural or environmental impact. 

Picadito Digital is a hybrid (presence base and virtual modality) media lab that provides socio-emotional tools to all boys and girls between 7 and 14 years old from the most vulnerable population in Argentina through workshops on Initial Video-Game Programming and Initial Robotics Programming. It is specially designed to enhance social integration, inspiration and creativity present in children. The initiative combines the following elements:

• Social integration in a diverse and inclusive space.
• Development of early digital skills, based on learning by playing.
• STEAM experience and gamified learning
• Significant initial programming and educational robotics learning, to awaken and or expand digital vocations in children.

Potrero Digital was created in 2018, is a network of free learning centers in digital trades aimed at generating social integration, virtual training and employment in the digital economy for young people over 16 years old with socio-economic barriers. This program contributes to democratization and inclusion in access to the opportunities presented by the digital economy through the development of digital skills for job placement. From 2018 to date, +5,400 young people were trained in Digital Marketing with Google, Programming with Digital House, E-Commerce with Mercado Libre, Animation and Video Gaming Da Vinci, Technical Support with Cisco, Cloud Practitioner with Amazon; and +52% of graduates are working in the formal digital economy.

Each of these courses have from 1 to 3 levels and a maximum duration of 4 months per stage, aimed to give the most accurate learning process for the students. Besides the technical subject they learn Digital English, Soft Skills, Entrepreneurship and Finance.

Fundación Compromiso’s efforts to advance digital literacy and promote social inclusion through Picadito and Potrero Digital programs are aligned with our goal to empower young people as agents of change.

With this solution we are creating an ecosystem where we serve and bring opportunities to the most disadvantaged populations in Argentina from a very early age until their later employment in the digital economy. As a result  during the whole process we:

• Increase equitable access to quality education, learning and training
• Improve the quality of teaching and learning environments
• Increase the access to quality early childhood education
• Improve the successful transition of youth into the workforce and society
• Enable remote learning and skills development through online platforms to increase access at scale

Target population: People from 7 and over with an interest in developing digital skills for those who cannot access training options at market values.

The world’s population growth and ever growing consumption exceeds its resources, with distribution inefficiencies leading to large enduring underserved population segments. We focus on projects that promote respect, diversity and social inclusion. The targeted population is people living in areas with low standards of educational, training and later job access opportunities.

Picadito and Potrero Digital are oriented to children and young people from vulnerable contexts in Argentina. The benefits of the programs are not exclusive to its participants, but also to their families, and the entire community. Furthermore, we have a special focus on women, since they are a particularly vulnerable sector of society, and where there is already a disproportion in the digital industry, for this reason 62% of our students are girls and young women.

We are impacting the target population by improving children’s and adolescents' developmental, educational and  prospect of successfully transitioning from school into the workforce and economic outcomes later in life. Improving life at home by making a real, positive difference in our communities by building strong personal skills and unlocking digital potential.

Fundación Compromiso is an organization that was born in 1994 with the purpose of helping to enhance the impact of social projects in Argentina and the region, carried out by NGOs, individuals and alliances between companies, the State and social actors.

Inspired by the work and philosophy of Peter Drucker to manage the knowledge produced by organizations in order to achieve social change in all sectors, Fundación Compromiso helps change agents understand what they do, who they serve and how they do it, focusing in what they value, and in the impact they achieve by doing so. Currently, F. Compromiso works in an articulated manner with impact investors in the region to generate and strengthen opportunities in the cultural, social and environmental spheres. Fundación Compromiso works co-creating innovative social solutions, with the communities that are directly impacted by the social problems to which we intend to respond.

We do it in alliance with social organizations, companies, public organizations, multilateral organizations, donor foundations and individuals who work to improve the reality of the groups directly impacted by the selected social problems.

Since its creation to date, Fundación Compromiso has trained more than 50,000 people from more than 3,500 organizations with social purposes in Argentina and the LATAM region through its programs, such as seminars, events, training, consultancies, among the followings:

• Pillars for Growth: Inspired by the 5 questions tool of Peter Drucker Foundation, with the participation of Foundation AVINA, Foundation Alto Paraná, among others.
• Schools for Change: reached more than 300 public and private schools in Argentina in alliance with Coca Cola Argentina, TELECOM, Pan American Energy, Foundation Prema, among others.
• Schools in Action: reached more than 100 rural schools in partnership with Banco Santander Río and AACREA (Argentine association of rural agricultural experimentation consortiums).
• Economic Strengthening Program for social organizations in alliance with Foundation AVINA.
• The Argentine Conference of the Social Sector, continuously organized by Fundación Compromiso since 1995 to date, is the main event of the social sector in Argentina.

From 2005 to date, Fundación Compromiso organizes the Schools for Change meeting, a training event in organizational management for schools and management teams and teachers in Argentina. It also developed numerous corporate volunteering events for companies, seminars, cycles, workshops, etc.

Fundación Compromiso develops numerous publications and content materials related to the strengthening of organizational management, social investment, public-private articulation, strategic alliances, and others.

We are bringing together partners from across the philanthropic, private, and civil society sectors to support our programs which amplify young people's voices, social integration and digital skills development.

Picadito and Potrero Digital's main objective are to give free workshops and training courses of digital and technological trades to vulnerable socio-economic populations. Although we depend on private and/or public organization's donations to support the direct cost related to the programs we also articulate further efforts to achieve our yearly goals.

We seek donors that help us to add value to our proposals through:

• Connectivity: we need to expand our capacity of facilitating these needs to our students.
• Expansion to new geographical places for new digital education demands.
• Mentoring, guidance and support given to the children and adolescents.
• Technology: it's important to have the best available technology in terms of educational platforms, communication and networking, in order to give the best tutoring/guidance.
• Experts with new ideas and innovations.
• Marketing, media and exposure: we are aware of the importance of telling our background, story, achievements and  social impact in order to awaken new opportunities of partnerships.
• Funds, professional services and time to this project.

For these reasons, we reckon that MIT would be the accurate partner for helping us boost our perspective.

We focused on social impact through educational integration, development of early digital skills and training for future employability.

Picadito and Potrero Digital are two powerful tools created to work together and break the vicious circle in which people with social vulnerability are immersed. Our strongest difference is our ability to provide a 360º proposal that ranges from accompaniment, guidance and presence throughout the training process from childhood to adolescence, with teachers and mentors who cover the educational, social, emotional, and digital needs of our participants.

Picadito Digital

Learning by playing is an established method to develop holistic skills in the first years of schooling, but it has also been established that learning through play supports the development of early literacy and numeracy skills in an integrated approach. , while cultivating children's social, emotional, physical and creative skills.

The Lego Foundation, after a joint investigation with experts from several universities, managed to establish five essential characteristics of learning through play, these are: 

1. Meaningful: When children can relate new experiences to something already known, thus making connections between things that are relevant to them.
2. Socially interactive: When children participate and work together in groups and use strategies that maximize cooperative learning.
3. Active engagement: When children are deeply immersed, they trust and support their peers, and facilitators guide them to develop new skills through questions, rather than just explicit instruction.
4. Interactive: When children have the opportunity to explore and investigate new concepts, try and fail and try again. They share their ideas, review and recalibrate their thinking based on evidence, possibilities and revising hypotheses.
5. Joyful: When children are curious, they enjoy learning new things and overcome challenges through positive interactions between peers and facilitators.

These experiences, based on learning by playing, have been tested since 2018 to date by Picadito Digital, around the STEAM concept (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math); betting on social innovation and increasing children's interest in science, art and technology. 

We work by putting into practice the instructional model of BSCS Science Learning, which is based on a solid educational theory and has evidence with a high impact on science education. The five phases are designed to facilitate the conceptual change process:

• Hook: Connections are made between previous and current learning, fostering situations to connect participants with their interests.

• Explore: Participants identify and develop concepts, processes, and skills. The exploration of the environment leads them to new ideas, questions and possibilities that are documented.

• Explain: The participants generate an explanation of their code, invention or prototype, they feel that they can explain what they understood. It will later allow the facilitator to guide learning towards a deeper understanding of key concepts.

• Elaborates: The conceptual understanding obtained by the facilitators in the participating children is the new starting point to deepen and generate new experiences.

• Evaluate: The facilitators will be able to get the participating children to understand their own invention process, with the physical robotics sets of the prototypes developed on virtual platforms.

Potrero Digital

Potrero Digital counts with different programs, all of them oriented to digital trades, such as Coding (co-created with Digital House), Digital Marketing (co-created with Google), Animation and Video Gaming (co-created with Escuela DaVinci), E-commerce (co-created with Mercado Libre) and IT essentials (co-created with Cisco Networking Academy), Cloud Practitioner (co-created with Amazon Web Services), and Introduction to Unreal engine (co-created with EpicGames) Each of them are divided in 1, 2 or 3 stages, aimed to give the best possible learning process for the students. All students must attend in our courses of Digital English, Soft Skills, Entrepreneurship and Finance (in collaboration with JP Morgan). Training takes 12 weeks.

During the whole pedagogical process, students are assigned to a tutor that will guide them from their first day onwards, not only with technical and specific knowledge, but also in the development of soft skills.

We see these tools as the first step to help them become part of the Contemporary Knowledge Society, where the key economic resource is the ability to learn through the digital system. In addition to offering free training, Fundación Compromiso developed a work agency called Compromiso Digital, which brings together graduate students to employing companies, providing students with support and mentoring during their first months of work, facilitating thus the labor insertion and optimizing the learning that arises from the worked.

The whole process is designed to build up a virtuous circle, in which people with just basic knowledge and few possibilities, can study a new (digital) trade, aiming to get better job opportunities and having better life standards.

Within every year we want to increase up to +25% the reached participants in both program. Taking care of the methodology, the implementation system and the continuous actualization and new incorporation at the current training pedagogical content.

5 years from now we want to offer virtually digital and technological trades training in all Latin American regions, attending the needs of each vulnerable community, with more than +15,000 students in total. We are working hard to build a cooperative system, in which the graduated students from Potrero Digital are not only able to work effectively for themselves or others, but also they can become teachers, tutors or mentors in our learning network.

There are two facts that prove the power that Potrero Digital has to change peoples lives in the future: the first one is that we live in a world that is more connected than ever in history before. The second one is that most digital or technological jobs can be done remotely, thanks to communication technologies. If we add this to facts together, the result is our vision for the future: Potrero Digital's graduate students will not be limited to the geographical region.

Given the theory of change, we have identified metrics that could reflect essential elements of Picadito and Potrero Digital's value chain. Our outcome metrics are derived from the theory of change: they were designed in such a way that they incentivise the achievement of key milestones that enable the desired long-term change.

Measurable Indicators:

1. Critical Activities

• Metric: Regular programme attendance
  • Evidence for verification: Attendance list
• Metric: Improving technical skills
  • Evidence for verification: Satisfactory submission of intermediate assignments
• Metric: Improvement in socio-emotional skills
  • Evidence for verification: Teacher report on attitude (proactivity, interest and self-learning).

2. Qualifications

• Metric: Successful completion and approval of the training course
  • Evidence for verification: Satisfactory submission of intermediate assignments and final test result (pass/fail).

3. Gender

• Metric: Women beneficiaries gaining employment or developing digital economy entrepreneurships
  • Evidence for verification: Employment contract / entrepreneurship billing

4. Digital Transformation

• Metric: Beneficiaries migrating from informal to formal employment
  • Evidence for verification: Registration form
• Metric: Creation of new digital occupation profiles to meet market demand.
  • Evidence for verification: Qualitative Information
• Metric: Actions, progress, initiatives leading to the development of the digital economy ecosystem
  • Evidence for verification: Qualitative Information

We have developed a theory of change taking a view on how we can progress from the current state to a better future and identifying business model innovations that can best drive the change in a sustainable manner. We take a comprehensive approach to value creation (return and impact) across strategy, capability development and fundraising.

Picadito and Potrero’s goal is to contribute to the democratization and inclusion in the access to the opportunities presented by the digital economy; through the early and permanent development of digital skills for the insertion and progression of individuals without access to training possibilities.

On behalf of this we have defined short- medium- and long-term results and the components of our Theory of Change:

Goals:

1. Satisfactory completion of the Picadito and Potrero Digital training stages, including attendance and submission of intermediate and final practical work. Development of socio-emotional skills: attitude, interest, proactivity and self-learning.

2. Productive insertion in jobs in the digital economy as self-employed, in a dependent relationship or in collective ventures, with a projection of professional and economic progress.

3. Economic and professional development and projection in quality employment (income level/teams in charge/sector/type of company, Development of training skills - facilitation in digital transformation).

4. Impact on the digital transformation of SMEs and MSMEs that make up the value chain of the digital and real economy.

5. Contribution to the reduction of the gender gap through the inclusion of a greater number of women.

6. Transition from the informal to the formal economy of the beneficiaries.

7. Development of the digital economy ecosystem.

Components:

• Inputs:

  • Teachers specialized in digital technologies

  • Internet connection

  • Course coordination and business liaison team

  • Donors and Strategic Partners

• Activities

  • According to speciality and training stage

  • Access to specific material

  • Coordination with companies and strategic partners

• Products

  • Beneficiaries who complete the course and are trained in technical

  • specialities 

  • Beneficiaries successfully submit work assignments and pass final presentation

• Intermediate results

  • Beneficiaries who improve in technical competences

  • Beneficiaries improve in socio-emotional skills and digital knowledge

• Short and medium impact

  • Entry into formal, quality employment in the digital economy market

  • Development of an individual or collective entrepreneurship

  • Women who succeed in finding employment in the digital sector

  •  Employment/entrepreneurship sustainability for more than 3, 6 and 12 months

  • Transition from informal to formal economy of the beneficiaries

  • Transition from manual jobs and migration to digital occupations

• Long term impact 

  • Digital transformation of SMEs and MSMEs that make up the value chain of the digital and real economy

  • Development of the digital economy ecosystem

  • Creation of profiles that meet the demand for new digital occupations

  • Life-long employment for beneficiaries

  • Improved quality of life for beneficiaries

Our programs are based on an exclusive platform designed and developed adhoc to our requirements. They include and combine participants' data and indicators & metrics that help us to achieve, track and evaluate our goals.

The platform is a fundamental tool that has different functionalities for students, teachers and school coordinators:

• Access to the professors, mentors and students
• Process of announcement, selection and inscription of the participants
• Student’s portal to connect, interact and access to the training material
• Host the training courses, the videoconferences and keep the recorded workshops
• Host the process of evaluation and certification
• Impact measurement

It's crucial to have the available technology in terms of educational platforms, communication and networking, in order to give and support the best training experience and tutoring/guidance.

Our organization CEO is a woman, and 75% of our team are women. We not only work for diversity and inclusivity into our key personnel: two years ago we installed a node in Brazil whose activities and goals are oriented to the black and vulnerable community of this region. Also this year, we have created an alliance with an NGO (Impacto Digital) which is focused on the non-binary and trans communities from Argentina and the region.

Picadito and Potrero Digital are targeted to children and young people from vulnerable socio-economic situations. We offer them updated digital and technological training so they can start self-learning development in the medium-long term for better access to the digital economy, or they can become entrepreneurs in the digital world. Our courses are 100% online, but they can also be blended (online and face-to-face), depending on each communities' needs.  In addition, we are developing a network, that in the future is planned to become an app, that connects employers and entrepreneurs with graduated students. A fee will be charged to any employer hiring a Potrero Digital student, that will be used to make the business model sustentable. After graduating from Potrero Digital, we continue with the follow up of the students, with a mentoring program to help them adapt as best as possible to this new working world. 

Our current funding are distributed in the following percentage:

• 46,9% Private Sector 
• 16% Goverment
• 15% Bank Groups
• 9,1% Public Sector
• 7,1% NGOs
• 6% Individual donors

At the moment, the funding and finance strategy to achieve the scalability of Picadito and Potrero Digital programs are based on public, private and individual donors in order to achieve a broad, loyal and constantly growing base, which allows us to scale up our social project. 

In addition to offering free training, Fundación Compromiso developed a work agency called Compromiso Digital, which brings together graduate students, and brings them closer to employing companies, providing students with support and mentoring during their first months of work.

Compromiso Digital generates sustainability through two different paths:

1. It provides employment opportunities to +18 graduated students, in high-growth sectors, such as technology and knowledge industries and charges a small fee to the employer for each engagement. This allows the granting of new training scholarships.

2. It seeks and impulses commercial opportunities through the digital services offered by the graduated students.

Fundación Compromiso is in the continuous search of new partners to enrich the program, but we are aware that  grant strategies don’t invite us to think long-term, as the funds put the emphasis on specific short-term results and are not designed to foster sustainable activities. For this reason we are starting to design and instrument a Impact fund for micro-entrepreneurs: to ensure that impact capital can be structured to support the broader creative economy and create a bespoke, constructive, sustainable and dynamic funding ecosystem.

From 2019 to the present, Fundación Compromiso has raised 1M dollars through the alliances with the main actors from public, private and multilateral sector, such as:

1. JP Morgan Chase Foundation
2. Argencon
3. Itaú Bank
4. Santander Bank
5. Supervielle Bank
6. MercadoLibre
7. Amazon Web Services
8. Pan American Energy
9. CAF America - Dow Chemicals
10. Argentinian Municipalities