How Afinidata, 2021 Childtech Challenge Winner, Reached More Children with the Support of Fundación Familias Power

One of the biggest challenges faced by edtech companies and social organizations serving early childhood and K-12 is scaling innovative, technology-based educational solutions to benefit more girls, boys and teenagers.

The task becomes much harder when these solutions are implemented in highly vulnerable areas with little or no connectivity, poverty and educational gaps that make it difficult to use, understand and make the most of these tools. If you are the founder of an educational startup, you know how hard it is to reach more people.

Still, it can be done. There are success stories like that of the startup Afinidata and Fundación Familias Power, who managed to increase and accelerate their impact, benefiting young children as well as their mothers, fathers and educational coaches. All of this was possible thanks to their joint work on an implementation project for the winners of the Childtech Challenge we organized in 2021.

How did they do it? Come along and find out.

Source: Fundación Familias Power (LinkedIn)

Technology for child development

If this is the first time you hear about this competition, you should know that the first edition took place two years ago, and one of the winning startups was Afinidata. This company created Afini, a personal chatbot that gives mothers and fathers early stimulation activities to do at home with their children. Its purpose is to help children under 6 reach appropriate child development.

As a winner of the competition, Fundación Familias Power implemented its platform for the first time in Chile, where more than a thousand Chilean families still use the platform for their children’s early education.

But why did this foundation take part in the Childtech challenge? Since 2016 it has worked so that preschool-age children living in low-income areas in Chile have better opportunities and sound cognitive, social and emotional development.

Did you notice? Both Fundación Familias Power and Afinidata share the same purpose, but with different, complementary solutions. It is one of the reasons the implementation of this educational platform was such a success, so much so that the project was meant to last one year and has now run for more than two.

Vivianne explains that before integrating Afinidata into the foundation’s programs, they had to deliver educational materials to families’ homes so they could do the activities with the children. However, it was a cumbersome process and the deliveries had a logistics cost, which dropped with the use of this tool.

“Afinidata helped us scale and save on the cost of educational materials and the logistics of getting them to families,” says Vivianne Traub, Director of Administration and Finance at Fundación Familias Power.

The foundation visits homes directly to teach parents early stimulation activities, games and reading tasks so that the little ones reach their full cognitive, social and emotional development. So the challenge the foundation faced was coordinating and managing all these activities, as well as scaling.

Fortunately, according to Vivianne, this technology simplified the foundation’s work by digitizing and optimizing activities with artificial intelligence, and by bringing all the educational content together on a single platform. This is precisely one of Afinidata’s strengths. The platform holds more than 1,500 play ideas with specialized activities, materials and educational content, which parents receive through WhatsApp, personalized to each child’s needs.

“Implementing technology in our foundation is very important, because in the end it is the only way that lets us scale systemically, in harmony and at lower cost,” says Vivianne. But the foundation was not the only one to benefit. Thanks to the Childtech challenge, the startup entered a new market, refined its technology, formed new alliances and closed contracts with other organizations such as United Way Guatemala, where they have already benefited 1,000 families.

This implementation began in 2021 with a pilot in Cochamó, a municipality in Chile with high vulnerability rates. The pilot ran for a month with good results, and the implementation then officially started with Chilean families and inside the foundation. It was a long process that required training on how to use and get the most from Afinidata. Even so, the results speak for themselves.

According to Andreana Castellanos, CEO and founder of Afinidata, with this implementation in Chilean homes, parents have been seen to build a better bond with their children, spend more time playing with them and now know more parenting practices. The implementation is still ongoing and is expected to benefit 1,680 girls and boys.

To all founders with startups that have developed educational solutions for children, Vivianne says: “Dare to present your technology solutions, because this kind of collaboration is a win-win for everyone. It is a very enriching process because it gives you another view of how you can solve a need that had not occurred to you.”

Your startup can also have the opportunity to work with other social organizations with long track records and leaders in Latin America, to boost its growth and accelerate its impact on childhood. You just have to take part in the Childtech Challenge 2023, and your startup could be one of the winners. The call for applications is open! Apply here.