Education meets
Technology
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The model we follow
From Rural Classrooms to Global Innovation
Our work is anchored in our vision for Africa! Our vision is a world where the 1.3 billion people living in Africa have a seat at the table in innovative fields globally, where African perspectives, knowledge, and skills help create new solutions to the world’s biggest challenges.
We are moving toward this Vision with Yiya AirLearning, by removing the barriers that hinder rural African youth from accessing quality education and claiming agency over their futures.
Yiya AirLearning is an offline remote learning app on basic keypad phones!
Through our app, we have:
90,000+
Unique Users From Over 10 Districts Of Uganda
3,000,000+
App Interactions
43,000+
Course Enrollments
3 Ways We Work:
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Village as a LAB&HCD
We work with communities to identify the most pressing local challenges and then we teach students and out-of-school youths how to solve the most pressing local community challenges by applying the engineering design process and using science and math knowledge.
Yiya students have made technologies such as: bicycle powered phone chargers, hand sanitizers, solar food dryers and homemade solar panels all using locally available materials.
The process
Yiya's 8-step Design Process (EDP) is a tool to to nurture their creativity, and to leverage the resilience that youth in rural Uganda have already demonstrated and extend it into learning environments. Each Yiya STEM course takes youth through the EDP to build a technology in their home that solves a practical every day problem. Through this practical application of the EDP, we aim to instill personal agency, foster interest in STEM, and teach them that this same 8-step process can be applied to any problem, equipping them with a practical and adaptable problem solving tool.
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AirLearning
AirLearning is an interactive offline remote learning solution that engages learners on 4 integrated channels:
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Low-tech, interactive USSD interface designed for basic keypad phones
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Lessons broadcast on radio
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Content distributed via robocall
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Participation reminders sent via text
We leverage a flipped classroom model to provide extra support to students since our lessons are conducted remotely.
“Youth from under served communities have a special need for high-quality STEM education, as it will enable them to solve problems in their local communities, break the poverty cycle, and reduce inequalities"
Samson Wambuzi
Yiya co founder and 2019 Obama Africa Leader
"Yiya AirLearning debunks the common misconception that students who drop out of school simply do not care about their education"
Erin Fitgerald
Yiya cofounder
A Massive Open OFFline Course (MOOffC)
The closest program model to Yiya AirLearning right now are the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) such as Udemy, Coursera, and EdX. These program models are similar to ours in that they offer accessible, inexpensive/free interactive learning to massive numbers of people.
The difference is that their users need the internet to access them, whereas for our courses a learner needs only a radio and a keypad phone. Due to the similarities (and the lack of another program with a comparable model to ours), we think they are the closest proxy for a benchmark that we can use. When we launched our pilot in August 2020, we use EdX as a bench-marked, which had been in operation since 2012. At that time, EdX had 24 million unique users, and 1.6 million certificates (certifying completion of a course) had been issued, which translates to a completion rate of 7%.
Scaling Impact beyond local traditional classrooms
Looking at an example of one course, MIT’s introductory Circuits and Electronics course which was first offered in the spring of 2012, approx 155,000 people signed up for the course and 7,200 completed it, which is a 4.6% completion rate. However, EdX points out in its own impact report (and this was the sentence that inspired us to jump in with our Yiya AirScience pilot): although their completion rate looks very low on paper, “it would take an MIT professor over 35 years to teach this many students in person.”
When compared to more traditional education models, we decided that even if engagement levels are “low” vastly more youth will be engaged in total compared to traditional education models. Yiya AirLearning can reach hundreds of millions of youth that face unreasonable barriers to education.
Before Yiya AirLearning, I was too shy to participate in class. Now, with reminders, feedback, and experiments I can do at home, I feel confident and excited about science. I even dream of becoming an engineer one day.
Jeremiah, AirLearning Learner
The Passive Classroom vs an Active Learning Space
In a typical physical classroom in Uganda, class goes for about one hour with 80 students, and only about 5 students actively answer questions from the teacher by the end of the lesson. This is 6% engagement. Yiya AirLearning achieves 70% engagement in every lesson.
We put in place strategies to increase engagement throughout the course such as:
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weekly alerts via Robocalls and SMS to enrolled learners to let them know what content will be covered and what materials they need
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periodic sms to students who don’t complete tasks to encourage them to re-engage
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instant feedback on lesson assessments
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reports on how they did on weekly tests
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other incentives, like airtime to call in to the radio, for most active students
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teachers thank students by name for completing lesson assessments before the lesson ends
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teachers thank students who called in to the radio
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learners record themselves while doing experiments and we play those audios on the radio to help encourage other students along the way.
Our work has been recognized by:
