Yiya Solutions

OUR MISSION Yiya develops resilience and creative problem-solving in African youth through experiential technology and innovation education! Many young people in Africa are born into systemic poverty with few pathways out. At Yiya, we believe the key to helping youth chart their own paths lies in teaching them resilience, creativity, and flexible thinking. These three life skills are at the core of every Yiya engineering project that we bring to schools. Our Yiya students have created technologies such as bicycle-powered phone chargers, gravitypowered reading lights, and homemade hand sanitizers, all targeted to solve real problems in students’ local communities. Most importantly, our students leave with core skills they need to create opportunities where none have been given to them. HOW WE DO IT We design curriculum, run teacher workshops, and give in-school support through co-teaching. Our design centers around experiential education in the subjects of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM); our Yiya units are rooted in the local communities of our partner schools and are aligned to the Ugandan national syllabus. YIYA’S URGENT RESPONSE TO COVID In response to COVID-19, Yiya designed a remote offline school that youth can access using a keypad phone and a radio! We send educational content via robocalls and text messages. The combination of audio and text keeps the model inclusive of low literacy learners. We follow up with live lessons distributed remotely via a daily radio broadcast. During the radio lessons, the teacher asks questions and assigns homework. The learner submits answers to questions in real-time via unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) codes, a communication protocol used by GSM cell phones to communicate with the mobile network operator’s computers. Learners also submit homework and complete quizzes via USSD. Responses feed into an online database, tracking user participation.