Abilis

Children in schools in countries with emerging or developing economies have a higher probability of not completing basic education (approx. only 52% for lower income economies and about 82% of children finish their primary years in school for lower & middle income economies* World Bank Data 2019) and an even higher probability of not attaining higher or vocational education of any kind (as low as 40% average finish secondary school for lower income and only around 75% for lower & middle income* World Bank Data 2019). This reality is not only typical of developing economies, as in vulnerable environments within economically viable countries the dropout rate is also a cause for concern. 

And these figures have only increased across the globe with the pandemic situation we have been experiencing since the beginning of 2019, for example*:

- Latin America and the Caribbean was the region with the longest school closures in the world, with an average of 158 days without face-to-face classes in 2020. The closures affected more than 160 million youth and children for one academic year or more.

- 80 million students in the region were totally disengaged from the educational process during the first year of the pandemic and another 80 million had partial and poorer quality engagement than in previous years.

- Although there is no evidence (for the moment) of a mass exodus from the education system, there is a significant increase in the risk of exclusion (understood as continued school non-attendance). The proportion of students whose head of household is unemployed increased from 18% to 24% on average.

*Data Interamerican Development Bank

In addition to a number of socio-economic factors that affect the lives of school-age boys and girls in these environments, four major headings widen the educational socio-economic gap:

The technological barrier; a huge number of solutions generated in the wake of the pandemic in the fight against school dropout are based on the use of expensive equipment and constant and stable access to the Internet, both of which are unthinkable in many vulnerable environments.

The disconnection between the classroom and the real world; traditional curricular subjects often do not take into account in their programming basic skills and knowledge for the full development of boys and girls in today's world such as emotional management, comprehensive sexuality, affectivity, nutrition, entrepreneurship, teamwork skills, conflict resolution, planning and a long etc, and remain impervious to the problems of the vulnerable environments in which they are inscribed and the new realities of the world: programming, manipulation of information in the media, gender inequality, among many others. 

Students perceive that they are not learning for real life, they feel alienated from what they experience in the classroom with respect to their family/social reality, and lose interest and focus, abandoning their education.

The lack of implementation of innovative teaching methodologies (easy to access for institutions from more privileged backgrounds): for two main reasons, on the one hand the impossibility of access to these innovative resources due to their high cost and, on the other hand, the demotivation of educators in vulnerable environments, discouraged by economic/bureaucratic barriers to access this type of resources, the lack of specific teacher training to implement them in their classes and, even, because they are focused on fighting to cover other basic unsatisfied needs in these environments (food, health, social assistance, etc.), feeling that these new forms of educational approach are not "for them".

These points constitute a major force why children and teenagers decide to stop being students, losing with that decision their capacity for intellectual and occupational development to potentially break out of the wheel of poverty in which they and their families are trapped.

Abilis is the project of democratization of educational innovation aimed at closing the gap in access to disruptive educational proposals by vulnerable environments. 

We act as a bridge between innovative learning proposals and teachers from vulnerable schools, through partnerships with foundations and public or non-profit organizations working in the field, both in developing and developed countries, to add to the fight against school dropout and in pursuit of educational equity.

It is a solution developed for teachers/facilitators of both school and extracurricular environments, because we know that they are the guide and cornerstone of the system so that students remain and/or return to the school system. 

With only one computer with internet connection the entire catalog of innovative educational content can be delivered to a complete school, for our more than 30 educational programs available (90 % of our dynamics are designed for an offline classroom implementation) and constantly growing and updated) propose a diversity of online and offline dynamics, which can be implemented in face-to-face, virtual or hybrid learning spaces with children and young people from 9 to 18 years of age.

All contents deal with emerging knowledge, are based on active methodologies and connected to the real world and based on 3 main pillars:

Computational thinking, The logic of the XXI Century - Solving problems of the environment through the application of computer concepts, in order to build a logic of thought transferable to other areas. Such as programming, computational logic, algorithms applied to real life, among others.

Global citizenship, The reality around us - Analysis of current local and global situations and problems, such as coexistence, respect or sustainability, in order to understand and act in today's world. For example: ecology, nutrition, effectiveness, body expression, migrations, integral sexuality, to name a few.For example: sustainability, nutrition, effectiveness, body expression, migrations, integral sexuality, to name a few.

Entrepreneurship, The attitude towards life - Development of entrepreneurial and social skills to foster the ability to identify opportunities and make changes that impact the community. Public speaking, debate, leadership, emotional education are some examples of topics under this heading.

In addressing these issues we work on fundamental skills and competencies such as teamwork, creativity, critical thinking, responsibility and commitment, communication, flexibility or problem solving among others, using formats that are attractive to students such as conversation and debate, roles, dynamics, rap, theater, programs in environments that are familiar to them such as Minecraft, art or film for example. In addition, all educational resources are linked to the promotion of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Moreover, the educational content is developed by authors from different backgrounds and life environments, who may be NGOs, small businesses, workshop leaders or niche specialists, experts in their areas who develop their content hand in hand with Kimple´s pedagogy team, thus achieving a multicultural vision on the contents, in addition to being available in several languages at present (Spanish, English and Catalan) and open to be developed in other languages in the future.

Students from Spanish-speaking and English-speaking countries around the world who are in vulnerable or at risk areas. We distinguish those who are targeted and those who are not according to their schools' accessibility to innovative educational resources intimately linked to rate of school dropout among their communities. 

Abilis brings all the content of Kimple pedagogical innovation to vulnerable groups where the dropout rate is a major problem, to transform education, empowering teachers and schools in order to train future generations in key content and skills for their personal, social and professional development, helping them to get out of the wheel of poverty in which many students are immersed.

Abilis impacts on teachers and educational facilitators to empower them, turning them into tools to attract students to stay in school, generating a virtuous circle in which school students (mainly 9 to 18 years old) are strengthened and motivated to be agents of change, in turn, among their own community.

Through the implementation of Abilis, Abilis offers access to an environment focused on the tools and resources necessary to turn its classrooms into poles of attraction and permanence of students in the educational system, with educational programs and resources that focus on the connection between the curriculum and the reality of the children and teenagers in vulnerable communities around the globe.

Abilis has already been successfully implemented in two Latin American countries through bridge foundations;  

In Argentina through the Por Los Chicos Foundation with whom we maintain direct and close contact thanks to the Argentinean team members who carry out the work of this NGO in vulnerable neighborhoods of Greater Buenos Aires, where we apply our educational programs and resources in extracurricular environments to motivate students to stay in school, in addition to working on issues that affect them in their daily lives such as bullying, domestic violence, sexuality, emotional management, among others. 

And in Honduras with the Veron Foundation, of Spanish origin that has been working on the ground for many years in La Escuela del Vidrio, a school project in the rural environment of La Providencia with a vocational training module that offers our contents along with the usual training curriculum to reinforce it, bringing it closer to the reality of the students and applying educational innovation in methodologies and learning processes (usually aimed at privileged environments), to fight against the socioeconomic gap and keep students motivated and involved with their school life. 

We are currently working on the development of a strategic alliance in Spain for the implementation of our pedagogical programs among a wide network of facilitators to combat school dropout among vulnerable communities throughout the Spanish territory and foster the development of digital skills of young people at risk of exclusion.

We are also promoting a digital employability project in the software industry for young people from vulnerable urban environments, both in Spain and Argentina. As in previous projects, we provide content and methodologies for local mediators to apply directly with young people, in extra-school environments, bringing their educational trajectories closer to their local challenges and providing them with more opportunities.

Abilis project relies on the Kimple innovation team, formed by professionals in the fields of educational management, technology, pedagogy, communication and publishing with a long history in the world of education, professionals who seek to renew the way we educate, both in what and how, in order to co-create a better future for everyone. Our company is made up of individuals from diverse origins and backgrounds, mainly Latin American and European with a delocalized work system, which gives us a more complete vision of the world around us.

Moreover, the more than 30 educational programs available respond to current educational challenges to which we respond in a hand-in-hand development format between international authors and our in-house pedagogy team. Thanks to our alliances with specialists, foundations, creatives, teachers and outstanding authors, we have a unique, challenging and high-impact content proposal,and we work with each author team on linguistic adaptation, achieving a multicultural and multilingual proposal. In adittion parties sign the free assignment of all content for schools in vulnerable environments.
 
There is a fluid conversation between all the agents implementing the Abilis program in situ, fundations and, of course, the authors, in order to have the pulse of the reality of the vulnerable environments and to know the points of success and the challenges to modify and work on in each case. Together with this we work on guiding the teachers who use the resources directly from our pedagogy team, with training not only to learn how to use the content already available (which is designed to make its implementation very simple and intuitive) but also to train them in innovative skills and methodologies so that they can participate in new educational developments historically intended only for high-income environments, so that teachers feel valued and part of an international project that will change the future of their communities.

Since its foundation, Abilis aims to bring educational transformation closer to all socioeconomic environments and to reduce educational inequality and school dropout rates. We want to democratize access to quality education, generate a positive impact on the way young people engage with their environment and the way they position themselves as citizens of the world and, of course, accompany teachers to ensure innovative and quality education in the process.

To this end, we plan to grow in its potential impact, in the short term, to reach at least 1,500 more students in vulnerable rural and urban environments in Latin America and 3,000 in vulnerable areas within developed environments such as Spain in the next 2023-2024 cycle.

We currently lack resources and international alliances to get the speed we need to reach our goals.

With the help of Solve we would be able to make these numbers even greater and it would enable us to reach a broader quantity of educational communities in Spanish and English-speaking countries.

Abilis offers a new approach to the persistent problem of school dropout among vulnerable communities around the world for two main reasons: 

1. It breaks with the mindset (generated externally but which has grown in underprivileged communities) that what is important and urgent is only that students remain in the school environment, by offering a new perspective. It is not enough to fight against school dropout per se, we need schools in vulnerable environments to have the same options of pedagogical novelties as schools in privileged spaces to fight against the socio-educational and socio-economic gap. Technology and educational innovation are as necessary and as applicable in these environments as in any other. 

We need teachers and educational facilitators in vulnerable environments to have access to contents that speak to their students about real problems that surround their daily lives and that can and should be worked on from the school, offering resources to not only teach knowledge but also skills and values for real life.

2. It targets teachers/education facilitators: They are often the most powerful magnet for students to remain in the education system. Abilis, through Kimple, offers teachers the possibility to implement in their classrooms educational content that goes beyond the usual and crosses the curriculum (in terms of "What we teach") and uses an innovative approach to the teaching process, with new methodologies that have proven to be very useful and particularly interesting to generate engagement among students (this is what we mean by "How we teach").

The Abilis program provides pedagogical paths for immediate implementation, very intuitive to use, flexible and adaptable to the needs of each classroom, eliminating the problem of the "rigidity" or "watertightness" of many other educational proposals. 

In addition, the solution suggested uses technology as a vehicle to scale and reach all educational institutions around the world but does not rely on technology for implementation with students. With as few as one computer with internet access per school to which teachers/school facilitators can have access to download the contents it will be enough to make Abilis program a reality in their educational space.

We also offer continuous training for the user (teacher or educational facilitator), which provides them not only with extra training and better preparation, but also with motivation and a feeling of belonging to a better educational system, to a process of educational renewal of great value.

In order to have an impact on reducing the school dropout rate, thus improving the employability of young people, Abilis brings Kimple's learning experiences to vulnerable and at-risk environments. Our aim is that all children and young people have the opportunity to develop - through education - the tools that allow them to collectively face current and future challenges in order to achieve a more just, equitable and inclusive society, without the place of origin conditioning this achievement.

These innovative experiences will make it possible to develop situational competencies, i.e., to acquire knowledge and develop cross-cutting 21st century competencies in the context of current contexts (emerging knowledge and Sustainable Development Goals). 

In the short term, young people will begin to work with projects that are connected to their environment and that allow them to understand the world around them, increasing their critical and analytical view of their reality. They will identify the skills they need for lifelong learning (beyond formal education) and understand how these relate to the ability to fully develop in their environment. 

By understanding and connecting all this, students will feel more motivated, as making "sense" of what is being studied and connecting it to other types of knowledge (formal and informal) is key to learning.

By working on a regular basis with approaches such as those we are proposing (transversal, connected to reality, with a competency-based approach), in the medium term, young people will begin to understand how they themselves can help and intervene in their environment. That is, how, through the skills and knowledge they acquire, they can take action to improve their own lives and have an impact on the lives of others. This will continue to increase their motivation and they will feel more connected and involved with the educational center as an entity, recovering the social value of the school institution and of belonging, of building bonds.

Finally, by being more motivated and interested, they will devote more time to learning (as neuroscience tells us) and will therefore progress in the development of their key competencies.

In the long term, all these issues (motivation, sense of belonging, development of competencies, etc.) will lead to a reduction in school dropout rates. Having achieved not only permanence within the educational system, but also ensuring that it is the setting for quality education, the school trajectories of young people will be strengthened, achieving significant learning and a set of cross-cutting skills and knowledge to develop as leaders, agents of change and active individuals, regardless of their socioeconomic background, capable of positively influencing their community. Leadership skills, self-knowledge, effective communication, empathy, personal care, care for others and the environment, among others, will help them not only to successfully enter and remain in the labor market, improving their career paths, but also to grow, foster healthy interpersonal relationships and achieve higher levels of well-being throughout their lives. 

To measure progress towards our goals, we have divided the indicators into three main groups: students, teachers and schools.  We currently measure our progress through Amplitude and our own platform.

In the case of students, we want to measure the motivation and degree of involvement they have in their educational itinerary which, as mentioned in previous sections, lead to the reduction of school dropout rates, the improvement of educational trajectories and facilitates insertion into the labor market. 
 
The expected result is that students participate in an experiential teaching based on the development of competencies and the search for solutions to current challenges. In this first phase we measure:
- Assessment of the learning experiences received.
- Skills and competencies developed in students.
- Addressing SDGs with the learning proposals received.
- Emerging themes with which they have had contact.

To measure teacher´s implementation of the contents, get to know how they design, execute and evaluate in a collaboratively way among peers, using learning experiences with current topics and issues that enhance the development of students' competencies, (with the student as the center of learning) we work wroungthefollowing indicators:
- Emerging themes addressed.
- Educational resources and programs applied.
- Preferred language.
- SDGs addressed.
- Learning methodologies applied.
- Folders created: personal itineraries created by the teaching teams.
- Most used search filters, and thus their preferences and most valued criteria.
- Collaborative teaching work: collaborative portfolios created.
- Most valued aspects of each resource by the teaching teams.
- Ratings and teacher feedback for each resource.
- Resources most valued by the teaching teams.
 
As for the educational centers (students, teachers and teaching staff in general) the expected result is the collaboration with their environment to carry out these experiences. In this case, we measure the impact through quarterly meetings and surveys with the management teams. 
 
We are currently working to incorporate in a second phase other measurement methods such as focus groups and surveys. 

First, advances in educational innovation (always associated with high implementation costs) and then the pandemic have widened the socio-educational gap between the education available to the most favored groups and that available to the most vulnerable communities.

One of the great challenges we face as a society is to guarantee quality education as a common good for all the children and young people of the world. Quality education as a right that ensures the full development of individuals and with it, their successful personal, social and labor performance. Inequity in access to quality educational experiences obscures the role of education as a driver of social mobility, contributing on the contrary to perpetuate the cycle of poverty of the most disadvantaged populations. 

Therefore, ensuring quality education for all represents the solution to three other major problems of concern: school dropout, poverty and youth labor market insertion. 
 
These are the long-term objectives we have set ourselves with Abilis: 

- To reduce school dropout rates.

- Improve the entry of young people into the labor market through quality jobs.

- Thus break the cycle of poverty...
 
In the medium term, we seek to increase the students' interest and motivation for their education, improve their skills, increase their involvement in the world's problems, and link the neighborhood's educational community with the school. We also work together with the teaching staff to help them plan and carry out projects with current topics and innovative methodologies to build meaningful learning experiences that strengthen the bond between young people and the school and nurture the desire to learn how to learn. 
 
To this end, we have the following resources: 

- Continuous teacher training (within each resource and through educational boosters)

- More than 30 educational programs ready to implement and developed by specialists from different parts of the world

- Methodological proposals to develop essential skills for the present/employability/life.
 
These resources are accompanied by specific activities that complement and enrich them to achieve the desired results. Among them: 

(i) teacher training workshops, pedagogical accompaniment for the planning and implementation of new themes and methodologies, 

(ii) support to schools in the challenge of modernizing education, 

(iii) thematic events and challenges for teachers and students, 

(iv) alliances with authors (NGOs, companies, entrepreneurs, workshop leaders, artistic companies, among others) for the development and distribution of their educational programs, 

(v) pedagogical accompaniment to authors, contributing our experience and knowledge of the dynamics of classrooms and the needs of teaching staffs. 

In addition, in order to bring innovation to vulnerable environments:

- We partner with foundations worldwide that work with educators in these contexts.

- We generate alliances with public agencies.

- We offer a scholarship plan. 

As already stated in this document, Abilis is based on Kimple´s structure, a web platform that uses and combines some worldwide known technologies:

• .NET Core
• Vue:js
• AWS services, such as Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, S3 and RDS
• A PostgreSQL database.
• DockerHub
• Hubspot
• Amplitude

.NET Core is a free and open source framework for building many different types of applications. At Kimple we use it to develop our back-end services and APIs (application programming interface). These services are accessed and consumed by a frontend service. 

The front-end service is developed using Vue.js, a progressive Javascript based framework for building user interfaces. The application runs and makes use of a wide AWS services.

First, the backend is deployed as a Docker image on the AWS infrastructure and is managed with Elastic Beanstalk service (which facilitates capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring). The Docker Image used is built automatically with the help of Dockerhub once a new version of application requires deployment.

Second, our front-end is deployed into a S3 bucket. The S3 service is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Third, we use Amazon RDS, this service allows us to operate, and scale a relational database in the Amazon cloud. Moreover, the application uses a PostgreSQL database for all data except for our mailing service which accesses a Microsoft SQL Server database.

Finally, we use Amplitude to gather application usage analytics and Hubspot, a marketing & sales CRM , to keep contact information, to be able to keep in contact with anyone who is interested in this solution.

Abilis is a project that lives within Kimple, and it is made up of people who are part of Kimple, we all contribute our best in our own way so that Abilis can function regardless of the fact that there are two people in charge of carrying out the project. We are convinced that the positive impact on education and the world that we aim to achieve must come from a team that thrives in a safe and happy environment that empowers and promotes diversity of opinions and visions. One of our main goals at Kimple is to first reflect on a small scale the change we would like to see on a global level.
 
We work from 9 different cities around the world, and we believe that multiculturalism should be transmitted in the different educational and social impact projects we carry out.
 
When it comes to growing as a team, we prioritize skills over hard knowledge, and we promote and encourage continuous training as part of professional and personal growth, 3 of our 12 employees are currently studying for their master's degree.
 
We know and defend that an education that aims at the attention to diversity must do it from the work with the whole group and these diversities can be taken as part of learning for all, knowing that we are part of a versatile and changing world. Some of our colleagues face learning challenges such as dislexya and this allows us not only to learn new ways of adapting to work, but also to bring to the classroom situations of inclusion experienced in first person.
 
Our schedules are flexible and in order to balance our profession with other aspects of life we have a work by objectives policy. The majority of our team members are women, 4 of whom are mothers, and we work to achieve a work space that facilitates parenting and accompaniment in the different family situations that may arise. Attending to the fact that the personal life of our team is a priority for a better well-being.
 
It is part of our essence to reflect in all Kimple's projects our values of inclusion and respect in all areas of life, knowing that in diversity and the encounter from otherness, we can collaboratively build that future that we have mainly as citizens, and that we try to be able to transmit it in the projects that reach the classrooms.
 
As a team always aim at horizontal, collaborative and interarea development: in addition to having a weekly meeting of the whole team, the work meetings by areas or projects are open and public so that all members can join the spaces where they want to collaborate.

Abilis is a non-profit project of Kimple education, aimed at teachers and school management teams in vulnerable environments, which we access through B2F and B2G models.

We are currently working on the sustainability of Kimple as a non-profit model for vulnerable environments. 

To this end, we are working in alliances with Foundations, through which we provide the project and they finance our associated expenses (teacher training and technological cost), ceding all content rights.

We are working in parallel in applying for grants and subsidies in Spain and Latin America to support projects with social impact, and trying to generate alliances with the Social Services areas of the Governments of Spain and LATAM.

As of today we have not achieved financial sustainability of Abilis and we sustain it with resourcesallocated directly from Kimple, which is financed through the sale in schools and raising a round of investment.

We are now working on the sustainability of Abilis as a non-profit model for vulnerable environments:
 
- Developing alliances with Foundations, through which we provide the project and they finance our associated expenses (teacher training and technological cost), ceding all content rights.
 
- Applying for grants and subsidies in Spain and Latin America that support social impact projects.
 
- Working on generating alliances with the areas of Social Services of Governments in Spain and LATAM.
 
The support to link foundations and other institutions to the project through the Solve platform would allow us to grow in both number of students impacted and countries and, simultaneously, make it an economically sustainable project.