Emergence Learning

Global south countries face a significant challenge in accessing and benefiting from AI advancements, as the development of AI and emerging technology has primarily been concentrated in the global north. Although some global south countries have started developing national AI policies and implementing AI solutions in sectors like healthcare and agriculture, there is a noticeable gap in accessible AI education and the integration of AI technologies in classrooms. This problem is vast, with over 6 billion people residing in the global south.

However, our teaching experience across various global communities has highlighted a critical issue: despite the wealth of educational content available online—from Coursera and Wikipedia to YouTube and TikTok—the vast majority of learners are unable to fully harness these resources. The challenge lies not only in the discovery of relevant educational materials without foundational knowledge but also in tailoring these resources to meet personal learning needs. Moreover, significant language and cultural barriers hinder non-English speakers from effective learning, as most premier resources are in English– and only 1.5 billion people globally speak English. While some individuals may turn to costly tutoring or paid online courses with human experts, many are forced to abandon their educational pursuits, unable to afford high-quality learning solutions. Additionally, the global south is disproportionately affected by war, violence, and displacement, with over 80 million people having their lives shattered by conflict. The rapid advancements in technology and AI exacerbate the challenges faced by these struggling communities, threatening to leave them even further behind and representing an existential threat to vulnerable youth who seek peace and prosperity. To address this problem, it is crucial to establish a means for global south citizens to access and learn from cutting-edge curriculum on emerging technologies, including AI. This access must be inclusive, regardless of individuals' technical abilities, native languages, or prior knowledge of specific technologies. Our mission addresses this gap, ensuring that everyone, regardless of their background or financial standing, has the opportunity to learn and grow.

Broad, high-quality education on emerging technologies will support the global south in the democratic development of AI through citizen input, local innovation and participation in technology development, and widespread use of AI across local government and businesses. This includes solving related problems around quickly generating curriculum as technology continues to progress, and collecting data on learners in global south countries to support specific learning needs. To effectively solve these challenges, we must address related problems including: generating curriculum that keeps pace with technological advancements and collecting data on global south learners to create tailored educational approaches catered to specific learning needs. By addressing these factors, we empower global south communities to participate directly in AI development and utilization.

We are creating an inclusive and accessible AI education platform designed to address the challenges faced by global south countries in accessing AI curriculum and emerging technology knowledge. This platform will flexibly create and host high-quality education on AI and other emerging technologies, regardless of individuals' technical abilities, native languages, or prior knowledge. To achieve our north star, we propose leveraging existing online educational content while introducing a highly scalable system (proposing a multimodal search and RAG system with vector databases) capable of intelligently discovering, aggregating, and customizing learning resources to align with each learner's unique preferences, including their language, cultural background, learning style, existing knowledge, and available time. By discarding the one-size-fits-all model prevalent in today's educational platforms, we will provide personalized learning pathways that are best suited for each individual, including those with learning disabilities.

The platform will include a user-friendly interface displaying a diverse range of curriculum modules that cover different pieces of emerging technology. Curriculum and learning goals will be generated on-the-fly around learners’ requirements in the moment, following new design patterns around native AI functionality. All curricula will cater to learners with different learning styles and backgrounds and be accessible across multiple languages, ensuring that language barriers do not hinder access.

In the background, we will prioritize the collection of data on learners in global south countries. This data allows us to gain insights into their learning behaviors and unique challenges, so that we may tailor our design approach accordingly. By combining advanced AI technologies and a user-centric design, our solution provides global south citizens with the tools and resources they need to learn and benefit from emerging technologies, such as AI, in a meaningful and locally beneficial way.

While this solution will be broadly useful for dipping into any educational topic as a student in any region around the world, for our minimum viable solution pilot, we will work directly with students aged 15-25 in underserved communities. We will pick students in one underserved locality with non-English learners and a significant refugee population, such as Egypt or Lebanon, sectioned into technical and non-technical practitioners. This population is an extreme example of students with hindered access to quality education and locally relevant learning tools. These global south countries have rapidly developing tech economies but lack the local investment into education that nearby Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE are carrying out.

We know from our 10 years of experience working in different global south countries that young students, particularly in underserved or refugee communities, are eager to take on self-directed study to learn academic or vocational skills that provide a competitive edge. Despite their eagerness, these students often suffer from lack of available quality and locally relevant educational resources. This AI solution will provide a tailored, customizable, and enjoyable route to learning that ultimately supports employment and access to opportunities.

By administering learning outcome assessments and tracking enrollment from specific schools, we will test how well our personalized approach empower students from disadvantaged backgrounds, keeping them engaged with AI concepts that expand their opportunities. We will gather feedback through student surveys to continually improve the platform's usability and cultural relevance for its target demographic.

At the bare minimum, we directly improve student lives through access to advanced digital skills. But we focus on our long-term impact on tech sector investment and growth, which is highly lucrative and has less reliance on local resource constraints than traditional industries. Our programs teach tech literacy and digital innovation, both modern requirements for success: 60% of companies increasing digitization achieve at least 10% revenue growth each year; the average worker with advanced digital skills in middle-income countries earns 72% more than similar workers without digital skills (Gallup, this percentage goes up for low-income countries).

The Code.X founding team has worked together since 2015, delivering technology and design education in the global south and conflict-affected regions including the West Bank and Gaza, Egypt, Ukraine, and Albania. Our team has years of experience operating and teaching internationally while adjusting our curriculum to accommodate local contexts and student backgrounds, operating even in extreme wartime or refugee situations. Our flagship interdisciplinary computer science and human-centered design programs (ex. Code for Palestine West Bank & Gaza, Code for Albania) are known internationally for sparking local investment in technology education. Our shorter vocational programs such as our Palestinian Tech-Talent workshops and Code + Design Bootcamp have equipped youth with crucial job-ready skills. Finally, we are already piloting an in-house AI readiness curriculum to prepare our students for critically assessing emerging technologies.

Our team members are tech professionals trained and educated at Stanford University as product designers and engineers, later working in Silicon Valley as big tech engineers, AI researchers, and startup founders. We have unique access to leading industry technologies and a strong AI network within Silicon Valley. We began work on Code.X together as a nod to our personal/family backgrounds from poor, resource-scarce, and war-torn regions and a way to provide valuable education to those like us.

Our work exists to empower conflict-affected individuals directly, so we ensure each of our community groups (instructors, students, TAs, orgs) has input into relevant aspects of our strategy and decision-making. For example, our program design must be done in partnership with a local government or org, conducting in-depth needfinding with its constituents to determine the educational skills and industry connections that would best serve community goals. After a program, we implement a community-wide feedback gathering process, where our instructors, students, and TAs weigh in on opportunities for improvement in the following year. One of our volunteer teams is entirely dedicated to executing on these improvements. Finally, we heavily encourage community participation in influencing our activities, with regular calls for project proposals for any of our community members to implement locally-focused projects of their choosing, supported by the Code.X team.

All together, our background experience in AI, technology and product design, and education around the world makes us the best team to develop an AI-first learning environment for underrepresented students, particularly for contexts outside of the US.

Code.X has been bringing technology education to students in the global south since 2015, and our proposed technical solution is a new add-on to our current operations. We have heard repeatedly in the field that students across the global south desire and would greatly benefit from a tailored AI-based educational tool, and we have been eager to build and prototype this new concept given adequate funding to add it on top of our existing operations.

In the last 10 years, Code.X has taught 1,000+ students computer science and human-centered design for a total of 6,000+ live classroom hours in Ukraine, West Bank & Gaza, Albania, and Egypt, with 100+ Silicon Valley volunteer instructors totaling $1M in volunteer time. Our flagship programs are considered wildly successful as the first tech-focused programs in Albania and Palestine (press from Friends of UNFPA, ABC News Albania, Palestine Ministry of Education). The programs achieved a highly competitive 2% acceptance rate. Our graduates have gone on to attend top universities in the world, including Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Brown, on scholarships totaling $3M+. Code.X has been approached by 20+ countries to start similar programs and provide high-quality curriculum in additional topics including AI, Web3, and tech ethics.

In each of our operating regions, we’ve seen our programs accomplishing much larger and deeper socioeconomic impact. Our program inspired local enterprises to drive tech sector growth via internal job creation and tech scholarships/grants. We have thousands of active users (students, TAs, instructors - those in our program community) with 5 paying customers (governments and local partners, for-profit and nonprofit). Each partner organization is paying $50-100k per 12-month program depending on the region and program size, in addition to curriculum and training contracts ranging $25-100k. As one example, our local partner, Municipality of Korca, reinvented their city as the future tech hub of the Balkan region by promoting our program, Code For Albania. Some of our students and local colleagues have gone on to successfully found startups (ex. Hexa Business, Meshka.space, Maitri VR) and credit our programs for exposing them to what is possible. The skills and mindsets our students acquire allow them to think more critically and secure better education and employment opportunities, which in turn creates better social stability compared to other conflict-affected regions with a large youth population.

We are excited to receive mentorship and advisory support from Solve partners, both for our newly proposed technical solution and for Code.X’s existing programs providing emerging technologies/AI readiness curriculum for global south students. Our team is small but has achieved a great deal in the last decade and has always made great advancements with additional institutional support, such a 2x increase in programs after a partnership with the Cisco Foundation.

In particular, our new AI-based learning platform requires different product distribution and business strategies than our existing programs (particularly due to the wide range of global south countries and student needs), so we are eager for support in developing and testing these new strategies.

There are several existing online learning platforms that offer AI-related courses or AI-based education, differing meaningfully from our proposed approach. Platforms like Coursera and Udacity provide self-paced MOOCs on AI topics, with offerings that are not personalized to different learner languages or cultural contexts. Codecademy, Free Code Camp and other interactive platforms teach programming skills but do not cover AI topics in an interdisciplinary manner. Our approach accommodates both technical and non-technical students. Tools with AI capabilities like Duolingo focus on memorization-based learning, which does not translate well to the range of skills needed for AI literacy. Finally, AI-specific education companies such as DeepLearning.AI provide broad AI education but only offer material delivered and discovered in English.

Our solution directly addresses these gaps. Learners will receive personalized learning pathways, have access to diverse content on the full spectrum of AI topics, and learn through culturally and linguistically relevant examples. This dynamic solution will accommodate learning disabilities and other educational blockers. Additionally, our metrics are designed to quantitatively measure AI learning outcomes, not just completion rates. This focus on accessibility, customization and proven impact will allow us to effectively introduce underrepresented youth to the responsibilities and opportunities of AI.

Code.X started with a belief that building a robust technology ecosystem requires a long-term approach, rooted in developing exceptional talent and exposing that talent to industry best practices. This new talent should not simply be skilled labor, but also be able to "create" — as thought leaders and entrepreneurs. Finding a strong local partner is crucial for expertise on local tech education needs, outreach to exceptional prospective students, and the generation of broader community support. To support this theory, Code.X offers U.S. tech sector insight, competitive curriculum, and a network of experienced volunteer instructors to different global south countries.

We believe that every student should have the opportunity to participate in technology innovation. To track progress towards this impact goal, we prioritize several critical metrics for our programs, allowing us to evaluate how effectively a new solution enriches students' knowledge and skills alongside its ability to attract and engage learners:

• Students' quantitative gains in AI literacy and skills across four domains: technology fundamentals, ethics/assessment, data/algorithms, and career/applications.

• Students’ qualitative gains in creativity, confidence, critical thinking, and problem-solving in daily life

• Students enrolled on the platform month-over-month

• Percentage of enrolled students who remain active users for 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year

• Student outcomes and life events following 6- and 12-month usage of the platform (job opportunities, university acceptances, scholarships, awards)

Full-time staff: 1 (would increase to 2 if we win a Solve prize)

Part-time staff: 9

Seasonal volunteers: 130

Our work on Code.X started in 2015 (10 years) and we registered as a non-political, non-religious 501c3 nonprofit in 2019 (6 years).

Code.X does not promote or discriminate against any person, population group, or organization with regard to categories protected by applicable laws. These categories include, but are not limited to, race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender expression, physical appearance, language, educational background, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, and any other protected characteristic under the law. All employment decisions, including recruitment, hiring, promotions, transfers, training opportunities, compensation, benefits, and termination, are based solely on qualifications, skills, performance, and merit. We ensure that all individuals are evaluated fairly and without bias.

We actively promote diversity and inclusion in our recruitment efforts. We strive to attract a diverse pool of qualified candidates and ensure that our hiring processes are inclusive, equitable, and free from bias. Our organization is led by ethnic minorities (one woman and one nonbinary person) and our core staff has always reflected diverse representation by gender, religion, race, and cultural background.