The Challenge
100 million young people in Africa are not in school. This educational crisis is caused by physical distance to schools, the steep cost of school fees, and the use of child labor in subsistence farming. For girls, the hurdles are even higher. 35% of girls in sub-Saharan Africa are married before the age of 18, and girls are expected to carry out the majority of domestic work and subsistence farming. Only 29% of girls enroll in high school, and often they are discouraged from pursuing maths and sciences.
Yiya's Solution
Yiya is reimagining remote learning to make high quality education accessible to all youth, with the aim of developing the next generation of innovators and creatives who will contribute to solving challenges in their communities, and globally. In our flagship program, Yiya AirScience, students interact in real-time with a live lesson being broadcast over the radio through an offline learning app that runs on basic keypad phones. Students do not need the internet or a smartphone in order to interact with and participate in our lessons.
A Groundbreaking Education Model
We provide equitable access to remote, offline, interactive, and high-quality learning. In Yiya's STEM courses, youth learn quantitative reasoning and data-driven decision making through the 8-step Engineering Design Process and building successive prototypes. Our project-based lessons equip young people with the skills they need to change the status quo of poverty, and to solve problems in their local communities
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.
Samson Wambuzi
Yiya Co-founder and 2019 Obama Africa Leader
Yiya is accredited by DIT
The Directorate of Industrial Training (DIT)
is a Government of Uganda Agency under the Ministry of Education and Sports.
This accreditation means that Yiya is categorized as a schools-based institution qualified to:
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Provide all kinds of occupational and employable skills such as creativity, innovation, collaboration, problem solving, etc with moderate government supervision.
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Award modular transcripts to users upon completion of each Yiya AirScience STEM course.
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Conduct modular assessment and issue Worker’s PAS (Practically Acquired Skills) certificates to interns and apprenticeship individuals.
This is great news to the tens of thousands of out of school youths who participate in our technology and innovation courses and provides value and authenticity to our certificates.
“I got to learn very many things from the program over the radio like how to make solar food dryers, how to identify problems and also how to come up with ideas to solve those problems in my community.”
Okello Patrick
“Yiya Airscience has helped me learn a lot during the pandemic when schools were closed, it gave me a lot of creative ideas but the new innovation like making the solar food dryer was one of my best during the program"
Achola Loy Abora
