MOMBO

Infants’ brains form new connections at the impressive rate of 1 million per second. Therefore at this life stage, children have a unique opportunity of growth. Studies from the University of British Columbia have shown that children stimulation can be correlated with better long-term health, well-being, and competence. In spite of that many parents do not know the importance or how to properly stimulate their kids development. MOMBO is an online platform that teaches parents and caregivers activities and games that are easy and low-cost to maximize their children innate potential. There are solutions that already tackle the problem of children under-stimulation, however, those are expensive and not easily scaled. Many parents who wouldn’t be able to afford those, can take advantage of developmental psychology at the reach of their fingertips. MOMBO is a powerful tool because it empowers low-income parents to offer kids the developmental solutions that they deserve. 

According to UNICEF over 23 million children in Brazil are either in poverty or extreme poverty. That’s an alarming number by itself. The results of different studies shows that poverty has huge effects on children lives. A recent paper from the Federal University of Para found that 57% of the kids they applied a development study showed developmental delay. Two possible reasons were presented: their poverty context and the kids’ lack of necessary stimulation and adult interactions. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not a local problem of Brazil. A series of studies published in the Lancet Magazine from 2007 to 2011, concluded that more than 200 million children worldwide under the age of 5 do not reach their potential development every year. From this data we can make a safe assumption that many parents do not understand the importance or do not know how to best stimulate their kids development. It is understanding that Psychology content can be challenging to transpose from theory to practical life. There are already some market solutions for child development stimulation, however those are expensive and inaccessible for those in a poverty context. 

Parents and caregivers of kids between the ages of 0-5. They're reached through social media and online advertising and also partnerships with psychology clinics and schools.

Artificial intelligence is included in the project. Parents will be able to load their child data and based on that, the platform will offer personalized activities and lessons. 

The users will be able to give feedback on how each activity of the curriculum impacted their child individually. That information, and the feedback from professionals we partner with, will be used to continually improve our services.

Childhood development specialists, as Lise Eliot, have established that infant cortex overproduces synapses. Will survive the ones that are used the most. Experience is the path to solidify these synapses.

MOMBO is a platform that teaches parents and caregivers to properly stimulate their children according to their developmental level. In this way MOMBO will allow children from different social and geographic  backgrounds to have more equal opportunities of growth. 

The platform has a curriculum designed to stimulate cognitive, emotional, motor and social development. Each age group will have personalized challenges for the children. The parents of a 2 month infant will learn to build an auditory stimulation toy, while the parents of 2 year old might stimulate the same function through music. This will be taught by short video lessons on how personal interaction and games nourish the maturing process at each age group.

MOMBO is innovative because of the way it makes information available to parents. Being different from websites (which only provides the data) and apps that already exist (which focus on one aspect of the development and do not offer personalized content and practical solutions).

We used a technology that already exist to create our website and our application. However, we plan to include AI to maximize our customer experience in the application and reach even more people. 

One of the main reasons why children don’t have a significant development in early childhood is due to the lack of knowledge of their parents. Our app will teach parents in a very simple and interactive way how to play with their kids in order to improve early childhood development.

Currently serving = 0

In one year = 20 thousand

In five years = 2 million

• Next year

  • Have the curriculum finished and the content available in English and Portuguese. 

  • Have a network of collaborators to continually improve and generate content.

  • Have a strong network of partners who spread the word about MOMBO.

  • Partner with public schools and day cares to make MOMBO known to low-income parents

• Next five year

  • Have the platform available and totally established in Portuguese and English. Have a team working in the translation of all the platform content to other languages, thus reaching those who don’t speak English, especially low-income communities. 

  • Partnership with schools, especially in low-income communities, to have MOMBO as part of their curriculum, promoting group classes and encounter to train parents.

Finish the website and app with infrastructure to host all the content and allow large number of users.

Make the application known.

Raise funds to invest in technology, design and psychology / psychopedagogy consultants

We are launching the prototype so people can start using and we can continue building the platform.

When we launch we will start online advertising. We are also currently in dialogue with  Markteen to make the app known, to establish a partnership to produce content as well as to publicize MOMBO to their network. In addition, we are dialoging with APAE to make our first trial with the families that they serve. 

Also, by applying to challenges as Solve to raise funds to improve our technology and outreach.

Seven people work in Mombo iniciative.

Five are qualified as Full-time staff (Camila Vanacor, Fellipe Franco, Gabriela Oliveira, Gabriel Da Silva, Lara Lowenthal)

Two are qualified as Part-time staff (Fabio França, Daniel Tucunduva)

The diversity of experiences and skills seen in our team makes us the best choice to create a perfect solution to such a hard problem as issues during child development. Camila and Gabriel are psychology students interested in child development. Their sensibility and engagement with this transform them in the perfect guides to our subjects’ policies (developing and contacting professionals to create the best material) and supervision of the volunteers able to spread the culture of Mombo. It's also important to say that Gabriel had a large experience as volunteer living in USA and understands better than anyone the problems and delights of volunteering experience. Gabriela is engaged with a lot of world issues, and always brings an unusual perspective of all ideas that come out. Having lived experiences with agroecology and other social projects with nature guidelines, she immerses the team presenting ideas to connect her passion with child necessities. This is the reason why she is leading the social impact measurement department. Lara and Fellipe are both engaged in business planning and startup management. Lara is founder of a social development collective with astronomical proportions in Brazil, which has given her experience in business, especially in the growth process and expansion management. This is the reason why she coordinates this area in Mombo initiative. Fellipe is the founder of a technology specialized startup focused in teaching new abilities to youngers. The knowledge of creating business plan of technology-based startup makes him the responsible for the administration department.

Until this moment we are not partnering with any organization, but we plan to partner with APAE and CSA. 

Through a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) guideline, the startup is specially looking to assist parents whose kids are between the ages 0-5 and provide the best way to improve early-child development, our main value. This will be accomplished by providing content in the app for parents to access and learn from. The materials, games, and videos will be verified and developed by professionals, who will ensure that appropriate techniques, such as gamification, are used inside the app.

With the objective do develop partnerships with psychology clinics, child day care institutions and schools, we are also looking for the excellence in the Business-to-Business (B2B) model in order to establish long-lasting and effective partnerships. Beyond providing more independent customers, because those partnerships also help with prospection of independent clients, enterprises will also have the option to hire our services with better prices to offer to their own clients.

We believe that education is fundamental for the development of every individuals and should be accessible/affordable to all. MOMBO aims to teach parents and caregivers of kids between the ages of 0-5, how to properly stimulate their children according to their developmental level. MOMBO will enable children who leave in precarious and poor scenarios to have the same opportunities of growth as others. The children and parents will benefit from the activities inside the app as their participation will result in the appropriate development of their children . 

In this first moment, we are a bootstrapped company. However, being a company that is so engaged to solve a community serious problem, we expect to have donations in a very close future. As far as we launch our  minimum viable product, the income generated by the product being sold to consumer and companies will make us reach financial sustainability. To increase growth rate, we expect to raise investment capital, allied to the donations and the increasing company income.

By developing an online platform for early childhood development and family interaction we will be able to address a worldwide concerning issue. We throughly believe that the more people involved in our project, the more we will be able to help parents and caregivers of kids between the ages of 0-5 to help their children achieve successful development. 

Solve provides a supportive community of entrepreneurs whose general goal is to solve world problems. Working closely with other Solver teams will enable us to learn from their experiences with the market, consumers and their own challenges. With mentorship and strategic advice we will be guided  to overcome difficulties and barriers that otherwise would not have been effectively addressed. In the development of the app, for example, Solve can assist us with unique technical expertise and training. Also, if we acquire the funding prize, together with Solve we would be able to appropriately locate the funds in the areas necessary inside our startup, whether it is for volunteers or for the development of the app. 

We plan to partner with Markteen to improve our marketing campaign and our outreach. Also, we plan to partner with APAE and CSA in which the families that are part of these organizations could benefit from our program. In the future, we seek to partner with schools and  Psyco-pedagogy professionals. 

We would use the AI Innovation prize to apply this technology to our program in two ways. The first one is to provide activities and contents to parents according to their child necessity in each area of development. The second one is to use this technology to track where our customers are from and what is their income. By doing so, we would be able to see where applying our in-person program and workshop would be more necessary. Therefore, AI would suggest and direct the child's activity and help our team reach poor communities that need our support.