O-LAB: beyond digital education

We believe that quality, accessible education is crucial to empower new generation leaders from indigenous groups and underrepresented communities worldwide. Our project was born in La Guajira, the indigenous capital of Colombia. Only 29% of the community has the possibility to finish high school and the mere 5% hold the resources to enroll in higher education. Indigenous students are more likely to drop out of school due to language barriers and lack of technical and human support. Poor digital education and the failure of local schools to equip students with “21st century skills” rule out the community from the job market. 70% of those affected are women. There are between 370 and 500 million indigenous peoples worldwide, in more than 90 countries. Although they represent only 5% of the world's population, they stand for about 15% of the extreme poor. Reducing the digital divide means more opportunities for indigenous people to participate in a digital future while preserving their self-determination. With the aim of scaling-up our project globally, not only do we want to target indigenous groups, but also support unrepresented communities worldwide, as there are many who suffer from the same condition. Two-thirds of the world’s school-age students - or 1.3 billion students aged 3 to 17 years old - do not have access to digital learning. 3.5 million school-age refugees are currently not enrolled in school, and only 3% of them have access to higher education. The pandemic has further widened the gap. It is estimated more than 11 million girls worldwide could not continue their studies due to a lack of connectivity and inclusive learning. 

O-Lab is an easy-to-use, inclusive, and personalized application which makes tailored educational programs, surveys, capacity-building and vocational courses for at-risk young people between the ages of 5 and 20. O-Lab works both online and offline, using project-based methodology that allows us and our partners to co-create tailored STEAM education courses according to the beneficiaries’ needs. The offline use mainly allows students to do their homework at home and makes life easier for teachers when correcting assignments. Students across the world can also benefit from a dedicated Blog section to exchange advice, knowledge and best practices on educational courses or training. The app can analyze data gathered from students’ pedagogical and behavioral assessments, producing clear results and reports. O-Lab functions on low-cost devices and has an accessible and intuitive interface tested on children who have never used this kind of technology. The App includes a virtual tutor which is adapted to each community, guiding children in their native language, including indigenous tongues, in the learning process and making interaction more familiar and dynamic. 

With the creation of O-Lab, we are thriving to provide marginalized children and youths with digital literacy in education and the technological and socio-emotional skills to cope with a changing labor market. We have started our project by focusing on a local objective, reaching at-risk indigenous children and youths living in rural areas of the remote Colombian region of La Guajira. There, young students, between the ages of 5 and 20 and mostly living in rural areas, are facing an educational crisis mainly due to language barriers, and the lack of accessible education as well as connectivity. Before launching our project in 2015, we conducted exhaustive surveys and interviews with students and teachers to understand needs and issues of the community. It clearly turned out that young people were totally conditioned by the path of their older siblings, who, lacking quality education and digital accessibility, in most cases dropped out of school, without access to either university or employment opportunities. We soon realized that this problem was not only common to the most remote regions in Colombia but extended to many indigenous groups and under-resourced communities in the world, given that 63% of students worldwide in rural areas do not have access to the Internet. Thus, after the pandemic, which contributed to exacerbating the digital literacy gap, we have extended our project with the collaborations of partners in Pakistan, Philippines, Paraguay, Peru, South Africa, Nigeria, and Mexico. 

 The data we have collected from the communities we were working with show that those who could further their education were more likely to overcome hardships. This is especially true within indigenous groups, where the higher the number of girls excluded from education, the higher the incidents of gender-based violence, forced marriages, and teenage pregnancies. It might seem far-fetched to suggest technology-based solutions to education in communities where many struggle to earn enough to feed themselves. But to build sustainable communities, we need to provide local youth, the workforce of the future, with the skills they need to thrive and create solutions by themselves. In other words, empowering students to become their communities’ new young leaders. Therefore, we decided to focus on improving access to reliable, inclusive, quality 21st-century education in underrepresented communities with poor connectivity and a serious lack of trained teachers. Our approach is not to provide a solution, but the means to achieve the desired change. O-lab is a friendly and adaptable platform with an offline and customizable educational app, accessible on low-cost devices and adaptable to any language, culture, and context for young learners worldwide. The creation of this app is not intended to replace the role of teachers in rural communities. Rather, it aims to strengthen their digital teaching skills by giving them the opportunity to create personalized courses and place their own empowerment, and that of their students, at the heart of the project.

The key feature of our project is its personalized approach. We started working for the community, La Guajira – Colombia, in which our CEO and organization were born. Therefore, we understand the importance of locally built solutions and we have always prioritized our collaboration and partnerships with community-led organizations. Every new step to succeed with our project is done tactfully considering culture, personal biases, institutional practices, and community needs. We incorporate culturally responsive evaluation that considers views and experiences of students, teachers, parents, and Indigenous leaders, with respect to the effect of the projects. Through community focus groups and case studies, we analyze how the perception of culture, heritage, and roles in educational processes has changed. Supporting this, we conduct surveys and assessments to measure the improvement and understanding in schools through our O-lab data analytics platform which produces quantitative results like school reports examining basic learning rights, 21st-century abilities, and socio-emotional competencies. 

We are applying for this fund because we are convinced that your leading expertise in creating technological and innovative solutions can strengthen our team’s capacity-building and provide the right mentoring to achieve our goal of scaling up our project to 30 countries and reaching 100,000 direct beneficiaries in the mid-term period. We also believe that your network and connections offering is instrumental to build key partnerships to expand strategically our activities in areas of our interest and share best practices with young innovators working on similar challenges. As a team of young, passionate innovators we firmly believe in the potentiality and further enforceability of our project, but we are looking for senior mentoring and strategic advice from your cross-sectoral experts’ community to guide and inspire us in our search for market opportunities and recommend tailor-made support. Since we are also working to expand and improve our Application’s analytics section to better build quantitative reports and assess the pedagogical and behavioral progress of students, we are excited to know that the fund will further include mentoring to strengthen impact measurement practices. We are also in the process of building our communications strategy (in-depth articles, infographics, newsletters), and the prospect of increasing our visibility through conferences, events and media exposure is a great opportunity to showcase our publications, impacts, and achievements to a broader audience. Your financial support will be crucial to bolster our financial sustainability model, which is a B2B planned to remain free for rural schools and at-risk youth; it will also be advantageous to improve our personalized programming to adapt O-lab to each user automatically (AI), for community engagement and dialectic education, and to equip the App’s avatars with more responses in line with the cultural context.

O-Lab offers a unique pedagogical approach because it was created with the mind of an indigenous child, with a clear understanding of the needs, problems, and aspirations of a particular community. This is because O-Lab has been developed by and for girls from marginalized groups themselves. It is the desire to find an answer and a solution to a lack of quality educational and technological offerings that has been experienced at the very skin of those who founded Origin Learning Fund.

O-Lab aims to make education accessible, inclusive, and personalized. How? Through 7 key pillars:

• Connectivity: it works both online and offline, and it can easily be globally scaled
• Accessibility: lightweight and works on low-cost devices
• Development: stimulates digital literacy learning conveying to students “21st century skills” and a global mindset
• Engagement: users are guided through the courses by a virtual tutor who reflects cultural and physical characteristics of beneficiaries
• Inclusivity: virtual tutors can be adapted to any language, included indigenous ones
• Innovation: it uses a Project-based methodology producing tailored courses co-created by us and partners according to students’ needs, delivering tangible results
• Intuitiveness: users, many of whom had never used a smartphone or a tablet, found the interface easy-to-use and familiar

Our work is innovative because it puts teachers at the center of our project as well. The application doesn’t mean to replace tutors’ role, rather it empowers their capacities to build digital curriculum for students and partake in the design and development of the same digital application. Schools will benefit from the following traits:

• Gratuitousness: Schools can use the O-Lab platform without any costs. The educational app allows schools to create contents and set goals, which will become their official curriculum
• Adaptable: O-Lab enables teachers to personalize courses according to students’ needs
• Evaluative: the application measures the effectiveness of teaching on students through detailed reports registering projects’ achievements/weaknesses
• Manageability: Teachers can directly create or edit contents, courses, and reports through our intuitive content management program
• Availability: Schools can rely on our team of developers and our partners’ virtual support, providing remote technical training and support to help resolve any issues or to upload content

During the following year, besides continuing our current work and reaching our +50,000 beneficiaries’ milestone, we plan to set out a strong basis and logic model for the coming years. We expect to integrate developmental evaluation into our technology and scale up our AI personalized programming mechanism, continue to build strong partnerships with schools and community-based organizations, empower local teachers, and partake in a culturally responsive evaluation in our current work areas. We aimed at producing more accurate quantitative and qualitative results to better guide our expansions and identify areas of improvement.

In the next five years, we expect to reach 1 million beneficiaries. We want to strengthen our global growth and launch programs in 60 countries throughout the Global South and refugees’ campuses worldwide. We expect to see the number of at-risk students furthering their education and developing the skills that are required to thrive in this modern economy and overcome poverty.

We want to achieve these results by leveraging our strengths. O-Lab is adaptable to new courses, languages, and countries, and makes remote education more interactive and data-based. Thus, we can increase our range considerably by keeping on training, empowering, and delegating to our large network of like-minded local teachers. We have already witnessed the growth of our efforts in the last two years. O-Lab started as a local solution in a rural community where our founder was born and it rapidly scaled worldwide reaching teachers and at-risk students in Philippines, Pakistan, Mexico, Paraguay, Nigeria, South Africa, and Peru, and we look forward to continued growth as we are striving to solidify long-lasting partnerships with public and private institutions.

Furthermore, we believe that by maintaining a constant dialogue with communities and schools where O-Lab is implemented, our impact will go beyond youth’s education empowerment, but it will further provide schools and stakeholders with indispensable information to improve their pedagogical approach and better frame the socioeconomic necessities of a given under resourced community. By working with partners worldwide, O-lab wants to become a tool for education, research, communications, and sustainable development.

Finally, our outreach strategy will follow four steps:

• Expanding our network of local organizations, young community leaders and potential educational partners
• Shipping mobile devices and hotspots to local organizations to access our learning app
• Following-up on users' progress 
•  Delivering reports for sponsors, institutions, organizations, governments, and stakeholders to increase our visibility

Key existing performance indicators:

• +1.500 women teachers in vulnerable communities trained in digital skills
• +30.000 at-risk girls and youths accessing digital education for the first time
• +30 indigenous languages incorporated in a digital education tool.
• +6 released academic reports to improve the quality of education, with a special focus on gender equity for indigenous girls and women based on data collected by O-Lab. Further Reports’ indicators to measure progress are:

- Basic Learning Rights

- Socio-Emotional Cross-Sectional Competencies

- Basic Cross-Sectional Competencies

- 21st Century Digital Competencies

We also incorporate a culturally responsive evaluation that considers the views and experiences of students, instructors, and community leaders. Through community focus groups and case studies, we can analyze how our project is impacting the learning process and livelihood of at-risk children and youth. Additionally, with the focus groups and interviews with beneficiaries, we can gain insight into their perception of how O-lab has changed their pedagogy approach.

In the analysis of our indicators’ progress we tend to give a lot of emphasis on gender inequality within the digital world. There is a large gap in women and girls’ digital adoption and use compared to men and boys. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) reports that more than 50% of the world’s women are offline. This is more pronounced in developing countries. We reflect on these data because the disparities in digital usage limit women’s access to the full range of opportunities offered by the increasingly digitized job market.

Problem: the lack of quality, digital education among indigenous groups and unrepresented communities worldwide denies, in the great majority of cases, young people to access to higher education and benefits from the labor market offers, resulting in increased hardship and extreme poverty. (At least 463 million students around the world have no access to remote/digital education; In Colombia alone, where our project and team were borne) only 29% of indigenous registered students manage to finish high school, and 30.1% of the overall indigenous population isn’t enrolled in any educational structure/course).

1=Improved Education

2=Community Empowerment   

3=Creation of knowledge and raising public awareness

Activities:

1. Our customizable on and offline application, O-Lab makes personalized   and inclusive educational courses and vocational training for at-risk   students that have encountered a large gap in information technology   and quality education. Although O-Lab is installable in low-cost devices,   we may require providing beneficiaries with the necessary tools   (considering that, according to a recent report from the Gallup World   Poll, 79% of people living in developing countries have a mobile phone).

2. Together with our partners (private schools, universities, NGOs,   corporations, rural schools) we co-create the educational courses with   the direct involvement of local teachers, who can personalize and edit   contents and academic curriculum according to each student's   requirements.

3. Through O-Lab Analytics, our monitoring, evaluation and learning   system, we gather data related to student’s development which is   matched with indicators automatically and then shared with our   pedagogues and partner universities to provide qualitative and   quantitative academic reports for teachers, sponsors, and governments.

Outputs:

1. The education level of at-risk students has improved thanks to the language and context-adaptable application which guarantees young people to continue learning activities offline. Thanks to investments in AI to further personalize our app, the connectivity between teachers and students will increase, encouraging the latter to continue their education through the App. This will result in decreasing dropouts from high schools, an improvement in the access to digital education, and a reinforcement of emotional relations between young learners and teachers. (To date data from fields direct sources: 8 out of 10 beneficiaries further their education through O-lab; according to several pre/post tests we have conducted specifically, we found out that more than 50% of beneficiaries improve their performance and skills to thrive in today's economy).
2. The co-created educational courses have strengthened teachers’ self-esteem and their role as educators and reference point within the community. More and more students have enrolled in specific training and vocational courses designed and available on O-Lab, raising awareness of economic and social issues that harm their communities.  (To date data from fields’ direct sources: 8 out of 10 accessed to social projects and programs created by partners through O-lab; we conducted a qualitative survey on 100 students that use O-lab, and they have all affirmed that they feel more prepared to transition to the workforce and lead solutions in their communities).
3. The accuracy of our quantitative and qualitative reports has improved, and we are able to identify and assess weaknesses, achievements, and impacts of our activities. We can disseminate our findings to a broader audience, the public and potential partners gain full awareness of the big purpose of our project: empowering future generations’ leaders from indigenous groups and under resource communities.

Short-term outcomes:

1. Our AI personalized programming has fully developed to adapt O-Lab to each user automatically (including native tongue and cultural approach). A relevant percentage of beneficiaries reached (100.000) has access to higher education across 30 countries of operation.
2. Co-created training and vocational courses continue to increase among the communities we are active in and attract more and more students to take a decisive role in the economic and social transformation of their context. there will be a significant increase in the number of students directly managing a local project via O-Lab. (To date data from fields’ direct sources: 5 out of 10 led a project in their communities guided by O-lab).
3. The urban population of our countries of operation become more aware of the educational issues affecting rural areas, starting to adopt a change of values and approach towards communities facing hardship due to a digital education gap.

Long-term outcomes

1. The efforts in accelerating our automatization process will allow us to build the first sustainable rural school fully monitored by O-Lab AI. We have built a model that reaches half a million beneficiaries in 60 countries, of which many of these have enrolled at university and have bridged the digital education gap with peers who do not live in under-resourced rural communities.
2. By conferring expertise and knowledge though our tailored courses, we have built a new generation of young leaders from underrepresented communities that have succeeded in bringing valuable local solutions to social/economic issues affecting their realities, and they are able to scaling up their solving model regionally and globally.
3. The large public accepts and acknowledges our solution as a large-scale, adaptable solution to social/educational problems worldwide.

We make digital education accessible, inclusive, empowering and personalized through our customizable offline and online learning app & Learning and Projects Management System O-Lab. Developed by our team of young innovators. O-lab is an easy to scale tool not only for education and training but research, communications, and sustainable development. The technology has three components. Our content management platform builds Interactive Forms, Learning, Training and Capacity Building Programs, and Set Matrix of indicators in a few steps with our easy-to-use platform. The app can be customizable to the local context and language, while contents can be created and uploaded effortlessly and instantaneously by teachers in the respective region. O-lab mobile & web APP students can access offline to courses, tests, surveys and training programs. O-lab Analytics gathers data related to student’s development which is matched with indicators automatically and then shared with our pedagogues and partner universities to provide qualitative and quantitative academic reports. We are investing on our existing AI system which allows the application to have an increasingly personalized approach to course building and interaction with students.

Fundación El Origen has been founded by young women of color themselves coming from different backgrounds and parts of the world. Tania Rosas, the founder, as a woman of color herself, invited young women from underrepresented communities across the world to be part of this project and introduce the learning opportunities to their own communities. Since 2015 Origin has offered Internships and apprenticeships for young women of color based on the idea that our projects must grow from the communities we impact. During the contact period, Tania Rosas and managers evaluate the potential to identify interns and apprentices who can be upskilled and developed to fill future roles. Many of the interns Origin hires are previous beneficiaries. Furthermore, Fundación El Origen is led by a community of young innovators coming from different backgrounds and regions worldwide. From immigrants, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant backgrounds, we are committed to awakening the next generation of young leaders by bringing access to inclusive, empowering, and personalized digital education for all.

We operate through a B2B model. O-lab is provided for free to both rural schools and end-users (at-risk students and out-of-school youths). We mainly sustain this scheme by selling licenses of O-lab Learning and Projects Management System to companies, foundations, and international organizations which use O-Lab to build their projects for education, research, and measurement. The objective is to directly empower beneficiaries. We have also started to partner with corporations (CSR) to create long-lasting alliances and sponsorship opportunities to provide under-resourced communities with more devices, training, and O-lab platforms, fostering the process of virtual learning’s adaptation and youth empowerment.

We work with an embedded revenue model, as the enterprise and the social program are one and the same, and our business is created to serve clients and beneficiaries.

We have identified the following priorities to sustain our growth:

• Expanding our sales of licenses to use O-Lab (our major source of revenues).
• Expanding partnerships with local schools and community-based organizations worldwide to build and retain a community of last-mile learners.
• Working with local teachers, improving our Machine Learning system and ultimate our path towards developing AI to make our application more easily customizable, while preserving culture and language and delivering detailed reports for research and policymaking.
• Create long-lasting partnerships with current and future clients.
• Increasing our sustainability through institutional donors’ grants-awarding and strengthening partnerships with INGOs which operate in sectors like ours (e.g., acting as sub-grantee).

We have proven that our growth model is sustainable because since our inception, we have consistently achieved our annual targets in terms of strategic expansion, beneficiaries reached and economic growth.

2020:

• We launch our application worldwide – Scaling our model and partnering with CSR/international organizations
• We achieve our objective to reach 4000 beneficiaries
• We secured our 30,000 USD fundraising objective

June 2021:

• We became sustainable (being able to implement the application’s service across at-risk communities)
• We achieve our objective to reach 10,000 beneficiaries
• Our project is applied in 6 countries (Colombia, Mexico, Philippines, South Africa, Pakistan, Peru)
• We secured our 50 000 USD fundraising objective

October 2021:

• We started to develop our AI service
• We achieve our objective to reach 30,000 beneficiaries
• We expanded our project to 10 countries in total
• We secured our 200,000 USD fundraising objective

Partners: World Vision, Teach for Nigeria, Lapid Leaders Africa, Segal Family Foundation, DHL, the United Nations Secretary general envoy on youth, The Rockflower foundation.