By Angela Forcier | Board Member
We are happy to announce that Yiya CEO and co-founder Erin Fitzgerald had a baby boy in February! We are thrilled to have this new Yiya baby and future AirScience student on our team!
We are also very excited to announce a new partner in our vision: Someone Else's Child! They have provided grant funding that will help to support some of our tech developments, and the rollout of the next course, expected to launch in May 2021. We are so grateful for thier generosity and their confidence in our work!
Yiya's pilot program of AirScience remote STEM education was a huge success and we have been working hard to learn all we can from that course to improve what we can offer to young people in Northern Uganda. The engagement from users was the most surprising and exciting learning moment and we had to quickly adapt our technology to accommoddate so many active users! We are currently working on refining that technology so the next course of Yiya AirScience can engage with even more users, and offer even more options for accessing the curriculum.
Although Yiya has been working with secondary school students, we learned that 47% of our users were out of school even before the pandemic! This told us that this solution has a much broader reach than the pandemic, that we have the opportunity to provide a new model of education for the millions of youth who cannot access formal schooling due to lack of funds, distance, or the needs of their families, even after schools fully open again in Uganda.
We got feedback from many students that they were using the technology they learned in the pilot course to set up businesses for themselves: either selling solar food dryers, or selling the service of drying produce with the solar food dryers they built. This is really exciting! Yiya has always made it a priority that our curriculum is relevant to students lives and helped students discover that the engineering design process can be used to help solve local problems. Our goal is not just to teach a technology, but equip students with skills they can apply to their own needs.
We are busy designing the next course, which will teach students how to build Solar Cells with materials they have available even in remote villages. As part of the preperation for the next course and the curriculum, we will be reaching out to the out of school youth to conduct some human centered design workshops and better understand the needs of this important group of young people and how Yiya can better integrate them into our curriculum.
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