Everyone has the right to learn, therefore we have designed a learning center called the SOLE Lab. Help us build one in the village of Pisamal whose public internet kiosk got shut down affecting a community of 450 people. This coffee growing community in Colombia has been using SOLE for 5 years to learn and also to find ways to support their own community projects, all with limited internet access and precarious infrastructure. Now they want to take a step further and build a SOLE Lab.
Good teachers do not reach the remote places where they are needed the most. According to the National Coordinator of Education for Peace, 300,000+ youth, aged 15-24, live in the conflict-affected regions. Of those, more than half drop out from primary school; 1 in 5 finish highschool and 1 in 20 enters in some form of higher education. This is also the reality in Pisamal, where the people are eager to learn and connect to other worlds but don't have the proper infrastructure for it.
SOLE has proven to be a powerful tool to develop autonomy, curiosity, collaboration, critical thinking, and tech fluency. In the past 4 years, we have witnessed how the neighbors of Pisamal have used SOLE to solve their community and real-life challenges using alternative tools when they don't have internet access or the space to do it. This project will provide a facility for 450+ kids, teens and adults of Pisamal, to take their learning further and transform their reality.
SOLE allows learning to emerge in a natural way and we find it beautiful to discover what each community has learned and created with SOLE. We can't know exactly what will emerge in Pisamal with the SOLE Lab, but we know they have great dreams and goals: 1000+ people attending SOLE regularly, 20 different entrepreneurship functioning, 300 people finalizing their secondary education. We're sure the SOLE Lab is an innovative, creative and fun way to achieve those goals.
