Learning launch

Challenge:

Late In 2006, I was invited to a US exchange program, in which I was introduced to the global ambassador  of Technovation, the biggest entrepreneurship program for young ladies aged between 10-18. Through  Technovation girls work with women mentors, find a problem in their community, develop a mobile app,  and launch a startup.

We had a talk about starting this program in Palestine. I got very excited about the idea and about the  idea of giving back to the community by teaching these young ladies soft skills as well as technical ones.

I got back and thought it would be an easy step to start it, what I found out is that there are so many  challenges that I have to face;

1- Back then, Palestine was the first country to participate in the MENA region  2- The official curriculum is in English and some other languages ( we are an Arabic speaking country)  3- People here tend to be conservative and some of the mentors will be guys.  4- The political situation of Palestine made it hard for the groups to travel back and forth to their

main cities/ villages to attend the sessions

5- We have to go through a too complicated process to be able to access all the schools in Palestine

and the season on 2005 was about to start.

Selection:

Due to all the other main challenges we expected to face, I did some meetings with some experts who  have gone through the same experience in other projects in Palestine, and came up with an idea of getting  started with 3 private schools (in which we can access and the English language is really good) in the main  city in Palestine, because at that time we were more concerned account getting started and see how the  things go so we can learn for the next seasons, in which we will be having more time to get everything  sorted out in a more proper way.

Application:

We reached out to the schools and they got really excited about the whole idea. They even helped us in  selection process for the groups (from 3-5 girls) and so we ended up having 7 groups with a total of 32  ladies. That was not bad for a start.

For the mentors’ selection, we reached out to some friends whom we know they might be interested in  this voluntary work. And we managed to convince 7 mentors to join the teams we have. (Technical and  business backgrounds)

After that, we invited everybody to kick-off meeting, in which we explained in details the idea behind the  project, deliverables and the main deadlines, then we went through the ideation process, in which each  team finally managed to get an idea to start working on with its mentor.

Each team was introduced to its mentor, and they with their mentor put a schedule of the meetings each  week (twice a week for 2-hours meeting each) to work on the curriculum and the coding tool.

They had to work on the curriculum and the helping materials we equipped them with (ready from global  Technovation) and to deliver a mobile application prototype and a business plan of their project.

Insight:

By applying the learning launch tool without even knowing it’s called like this, we got a very helpful  feedback from the participants about things that we should adjust to make the most out of the program,  as well as the our observation through the application phase. The girls did very well and they were very  excited about the idea, but more preparations were needed and we had to start ahead of time to make  sure everybody is well prepared. We decided to start 2 month earlier the next year (2014) and try to  approach the ministry of education so we can reach as many schools, especially public ones, as possible.  We wanted to give those people as well the right to learn new technologies and gain new and very useful  skills for their future.

And that’s what happened in 2014, we managed to convince the ministry of education why this project is  really important for the future of those kids, and an official letter were sent to all the Palestinian schools  to encourage them to participate with us. More teams from all over Palestine joined and we started the  preparations and early workshops for both mentors and the teams.

After finishing the 2014 season, it hit us that most of the girls faced an issue while going through the  curriculum because it was in English, so we convinced young people from the university to help us  translate the chapter in Arabic and upload them so they can refer to it.

Approach:

Learning launch was the best tool to be selected and worked with for our own story, as it helped us year  after year to improve the outcome, number of participating teams, number of teams to deliver all the  deliverables at the end and the quality of work to compete with global teams.

In 2012, we had around 260 participating teams, 98 fully submitted their deliverables. And out of 2500+  mobile applications, one of our teams, out of the 6 finalist teams, was invited to the Silicon Valley to  attend the global pitch event, and they got the second place worldwide!

