In 1948, Costa Rica took the bold decision to abolish its army and focus on education. Even though we have one of the best and widest public education initiatives in Latin America, our youngest minds were lacking the basic skills they need to thrive in an uncertain future. We lacked creativity, idea generation, motivation, financial literacy, lifelong learning, and taking action: all basic skills of an entrepreneurial mindset.
5 years ago, we launched an initiative that will transform our country. We started as a small group that believed in one fundamental truth: Entrepreneurship is the most powerful and transformative force on this planet. We believe it is the best tool to develop humanity. So if we wanted to create a dignified, prosperous, and inclusive future, we need more entrepreneurs. We need more creative problem solvers. The more people we can incentivize and train to think and act entrepreneurially, the larger the number of iterations we have to create the solarpunk future we want.
Our group started growing and attracted key players to create something that really impacted the most at-risk youth from being left behind. We created a program to train teachers and students from the most rural public high schools in the country. We connected non-profits, government programs, embassies, private education, and businesses to create one of the most important education programs we have: Semillas para el cambio. We raised some funds from private businesses to create a curriculum to train young kids. For us, Entrepreneurship is creative problem solving, learning by doing, not giving up, working well with others, among other essential skills. Encouraging entrepreneurship is not just encouraging company creation. Our approach is to encourage an entrepreneurial mindset: a way of thinking to create the things that really matter to us by taking quick, safe, and smart actions when faced with the unknown. Our focus on essential skills has been based on the EntreComps.
We created a public-private alliance, led by Yo Emprendedor and the Ministry of Public Education, to create a curriculum for 11,000 students, grades 7th-11th, from rural high schools around the country. Theses students learn, during their regular school hours and as part of the nation wide curriculum, lessons to incentivize their entrepreneurial spirit. We launched a pilot program in 10 schools, sponsored by the U.S. Embassy, where we trained the teachers and gathered data directly from the students. We showed extremely positive results, having the teachers take action to solve local real-world problems and creating income streams for the communities. We scale it fast to a nationwide curriculum where we are currently at. You can see some of our work here. This development took years. During our voyage, one of the best things that happen was adding Babson College and Lincoln School to our alliance. We co-created a teacher training model to scale to all rural high schools. We currently train more than 11,000 students and 400 teachers with our methodologies every year.
So we created a curriculum, add it to a nationwide program for rural high schools, created a teacher training model, and have been in the field, gathering data and knowledge about what the students and teachers really need. Now the real impact starts:
We want to upload all our knowledge to create a public good. A free, open platform to train more teachers and teach more students. Our plan is to digitalize using a creative commons license, to democratize entrepreneurial thinking in Latin America. We will create a free, in Spanish, open, internet-based, mobile tool focused on entrepreneurial thinking. We have created an alliance to build this in Costa Rica, the good thing is, this scales beyond our nation-state border. Pura vida. We know all Latin America, Spain, and half of the United States share the Spanish language. We want to open source the public good we are creating for our country to help all that we can.
Students from rural high schools have mainly two roads, stay in their local town and work in agriculture or migrate to the city to look for economic opportunities. We know there is a better way. We have seen firsthand that if young people can create income opportunities, they will stay in their local communities solving problems and creating more revenue streams for the local networks. This is a magnificent way to create economic progress. If we teach them to have an entrepreneurial mindset + connect them to the world using the internet = they will unleash unlimited opportunities.
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We are looking for feedback on the project.
Is there interest to attract some initial funding to create the online platform?
Do you think this can scale to your own country? Do you have a network to create public-private alliances in other regions to extend our impact?
Are you a smart contract developer? We have a cohort of 30 of the brightest young talent from rural high schools next month, and we want to give them a (soulbound?) proof-of-knowledge
Are you an investor and like philanthropic work? We are looking for funds to buyback proof-of-knowledge from students
Are you part of an organization hiring young talent in Costa Rica? Are you willing to hire based on on-chain CV's?
Please reach out** **
Pura vida,