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Afinidata: Using artificial intelligence to provide access to quality early childhood education.
AI Chatbot that helps parents create fun and educational activities for children under six.
Andreana Castellanos , CEO Afinidata
Afinidata
Afinidata is creating an artificial intelligence chatbot that helps parents create fun and educational activities for their children under six. Using artificial intelligence, we provide instantaneous access to quality early childhood education resources to thousands of parents anywhere in the world.
The idea for this platform was sparked by our CEO, Andreana's early experiences volunteering on a project working with children in rural Guatemala. During this experience she asked one of the children "what do you dream to be when you grow up?" , the child answered that she had no other option than to become a farmer. This coupled with other formative experiences prompted Andreana to imagine a world where every child could have the skills they needed to create their own path. What is most exciting is that maybe one day that vision will be a reality through Afinidata.
Our team believes that a child's school preparedness is critical for his or her development and later livelihood outcomes. More importantly than what we believe studies and research has found the importance of early education and school preparedness for a later success in child's life.
"The first five years of life have a dramatic effect on later adult development. Seven hundred new neural connections are formed every second, laying the foundation for the learning, behavior and health we need to grow up as productive adults." - James Heckman, Nobel-prize winning economist
Afinidata connects parents to a virtual assistant similar to Siri by sending a text on Facebook Messenger, without any new downloads, just like they will do with a friend.
The virtual assistant will start a conversation, and after getting to know more about their children, our virtual assistant will suggest a new educational activity to play, sing, talk, and/or engage with their children in their own household.
Parents using Afinidata's quality early childhood education resources
FRONTIER TECHNOLOGY & OPEN SOURCE
The vision at Afinidata is to make education accessible to all. Being open source will allow us to move faster and be more collaborative to reach people who share our vision and want to collaborate. This enables us to share our challenges with a diverse community and create better and more robust solutions for our users. In addition, open source adds more human capital that will help our technology improve and help us tackle our challenges more effectively.
TEAM & DIVERSITY
Achieving Afinidata's mission and creating scalable technology-based solutions for early-childhood education requires multiple and diverse skill sets; from a deep understanding about how children learn from birth to age six, to coding and algorithm development, to business model evaluation, everyone on the team brings something different to the table. Although our team includes expertise in diverse backgrounds, we all share a passion for using business and technology to solve access to early-childhood education.
WAY AHEAD:
With UNICEF's Innovation Fund investment we are planning to build a solution for early-childhood education that is scalable and transferable to different regions and countries throughout the world. We expect to grow our program and number of parents and families who have access to early-childhood education tools through the program.
We are focused on building a strong product with bold growth goals. We expect to use the development of unique solution and algorithms that can prove a positive impact on child development and combine it with high user acquisition rate as leverage to raise subsequent investments.
We are thrilled exciting to be part of a larger cohort of startups that is working with emerging technologies to address social challenges.
About UNICEF Innovation Fund: The Fund has been specifically designed to finance early stage, open-source technology that has the potential to impact children on a global scale. The core motivation of the IF is to fund "clusters" or portfolios of initiatives around emerging technology, like UAVs, Blockchain, Data Science and AI or virtual reality - so that UNICEF can both shape markets and also learn about and guide these technologies to benefit children.
As well as funding the start-up companies, UNICEF's Innovation Fund will provide product and technology assistance, support with business growth, access to a network of experts and partners. The Fund also actively seeks second-round investment and support for companies it has invested in, as well as the opportunity to scale-up these technologies, when they are successful, in the more than 190 countries and territories where UNICEF operates.
More info: www.unicefinnovationfund.org
Join our conversations online. Follow us at @unicefinnovate
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