Children and youth living on the streets have a self-destructive behavior and are at high risk for diseases and HIV, drug addiction and violence. In Brazil there are at least 23 million youngsters nationwide that are at such risk. They are, typically, functionally illiterate, have low self-esteem and are unmotivated. Traditional methods of reaching out to them to participate through a literacy or job curriculum have failed. (10, 11)

Saori Fotenos and Deepti Rohatgi decided they could turn the lure of media into literacy training. Video is a key part of our landscape in the world today (mind-numbing music videos, movies, games to name a few) and they observed that youth are confident with video as a medium. This key insight combined with the observation that children are interested in themselves and their friends became the fundamental principle behind Vamos Blogar (Lets Blog!). They created a program that would take advantage of the ubiquitous presence of media in contemporary pop-culture to improve literacy and enhance employability of children living on the streets in Brazil. (12).

By leveraging existing open source, multimedia web log technology, Vamos Blogar has created an authoring environment that serves as a communications curriculum for low-literacy urban youth. After creating the platform, a pilot was done to gauge effectiveness of the approach. They found that children were not threatened by the technology like they are with educational text materials. In the favelas – or slums - of Rio de Janeiro, Bruno blogged about carnaval costumes; Wellington responded with a comment and Bruno worked with a teacher to write a response to Wellington The pilot successfully demonstrated that unmotivated, high risk youth can be drawn out to communicate and subsequently learn skills by participating in creating content which is personal and allows peer interaction. (13)

“It works because the technology is taught from an inverse perspective by starting first with multimedia and then returning to text and word processing” says Saori.

In Brazil alone there are 3200 tele-centers and teachers can be trained cost effectively through workshops of tele-center coordinators. Deployment costs are highly leveraged because the multimedia blogging platform is free, content is generated by users and the growing tele-center infrastructure is the vehicle for propagation and scaling. The curriculum consists of 8 one-hour classes taught in any order after the first class in which youth immediately video blog. Hence a very low-cost franchise model is possible.

Vamos Blogar’s mission of social inclusion capitalizes on a media savvy pop-culture and builds up youth self-efficacy thereby creating the motivation for learning job skills not related to drugs and violence.

The following table summarizes the key attributes of the three cases:

	Southwest Creations	Digital Equalizer	Vamos Blogar
Social mission	Enhance dignity through employability	social change through education by harnessing technology	Engage at-risk youth to provide job skills, literacy
Social sector	Low-skill women in New Mexico	Underserved children in India	Street children in Brazil
Key insight: competitive advantage	Providing social support to low-income workers creates stability in their family life and hence: - low employee turnover - training gets leveraged - employees able to deliver high quality	Harness technology: - leverage existing school, community infrastructure - pre-package, pre-configure HW, SW, connectivity for low-cost replication - train local teachers	Video blogging engages media savvy at-risk youth - provide a “safe” place to be - hands-on, self-taught skills in communication, literacy, computers
Sustainability model	Achieve cost effectiveness and quality through employee loyalty and retention	Prove concept through pilots and seek government partnerships to scale	Open-source SW platform deployed on computers in NGO run (or other) tele-centers
Social metrics	Employees’ children stay and perform in school; Acquisition of English language skills by employees	Number of children educated; Number of schools started	Number of youth that stay off the street by coming to the tele-center
Economic metrics	Revenue from business, cost effectiveness of services offered; Reduction in social service costs	New partnerships, scaling ability, self-sustainability of a center	Impact of lowered crime, drug use as reflected in reduced social and law enforcement services