Mission
We are a brand-new charity currently starting up in the UK. Currently, we don't have any funding at all.
We have a clearly-defined, practically deliverable strategy for delivering world-class digital educational content in hard-to-reach places in an offline and off-grid manner. I have hunted high and low, and believe there simply is nothing like what we are planning to deliver out there.
We are aiming to start service delivery with a base in northern Namibia, but with service delivery aimed at southern Angola. For a pilot project, we are looking at setting up in the Namibian town of Ruacana, with service delivery aimed at the Cunene province of Angola.
Education throughout Angola is extremely poor, and there are over four million kids of primary school age (7 to 11 years old) who simply do not attend school at all. Around 30% of children in that age bracket never get to finish primary school, and of course there are millions of adults with very poor education. This simply perpetuates the poverty cycle.
We are not looking at delivering formal schooling (although "formal schooling" in Angola often simply consists of a chalkboard on an easel, out in the open). Instead, we are aiming to deliver informal education, where learners can engage with at the level and frequency of their choosing. Service delivery will be done via bicycle, and each bicycle, along with the rider, will be a self-contained learning delivery platform.
The educational content is world-class videos, and will be delivered in the local language - in this case Portuguese. This means, the learning facilitators, who will be riding the bicycles, needn't be highly skilled educators.
Our solution has the ability to aggregate the learning progress of thousands of individual learners, to allow us insight into the effectiveness of what we are delivering. We also have a progression plan in place, to scale up the informal education we will deliver. Education will not be aimed at any specific age group, but we will incorporate a specific focus on delivering education to females.
We have the plan, we have the technical expertise, we have the willingness to proceed, and we have three trustees with a huge amount of shared experience between us. What we need now is funding.
For an initial pilot, we are looking for around £15 000. We envisage the pilot will last six months. Despite having a strong plan ready to go, we accept that there will be real-life lessons to learn, which may force us to update or amend our service delivery plans. This is not to say our plans are weak, but rather that we are determined to remain flexible.
Naturally, as soon as we have funding ready to go, we will register with the UK's Charity Commission, to become a registered charity. The only reason we have not yet done so is the Commission's requirement for evidence of at least £5 000 worth of funding, or turnover.
Our solution is utterly scalable, and our learning content is available in ten languages, including Spanish. We believe that Cycle of Knowledge can become a big force for good in the lives of many of the world's poorest people, and can relatively easily be deployed in many different countries. We are hoping, following a successful pilot, to expand firstly along the Namibia/Angola border, and later to look at commencing service delivery in Mozambique and Malawi.
Category
Education and Skills
Additional Information
Cycle of Knowledge has all the technical skills it needs. We have the project management skills and experience, and we have a strong commitment to make a success of this.
What we lack is a comprehensive and professional marketing strategy. We obviously need to attract funding, as without funding our vision simply cannot be delivered. We are hoping for assistance in raising our profile, and improving our image, which should in turn help us become successful at raising the funds we need.
