Education for work is vitally important for the next generations to thrive. In poor countries, access to education for work is not always a given. East Africa’s Burundi is the poorest country on earth. Creatable by Australia’s Finch production company has just developed an education course for Burundi and a system that is universally adaptable, in response to a UNICEF brief to make innovation accessible to the poorest country on Earth. It has just been adopted as policy by Burundi’s Ministry of Education. Creatable’s goal is to give everyone in the world access to future skills for future work.
In order to make the course relevant, UNICEF and Creatable asked the youth of Burundi where they most needed assistance. Their answer? Smoke inhalation from open cooking fires in homes, which kills close to 4 million people worldwide each year.
To combat smoke inhalation, Creatable designed a course that teaches students to build Rocket Stoves using upcycled local materials. The Rocket Stove is designed to emit little to no smoke and use 75% less wood whilst burning at a higher heat.
Finch’s brief was part of UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited strategy, founded in response to the urgent crisis facing the world’s 1.8 billion young people – the largest cohort in human history.
Former UNICEF executive director, Henrietta Fore, explained. “Every month, 10 million young people reach working age, but our world is not creating 10 million new jobs each month … They want to learn future skills for future work. They want to learn digital technology and green technologies. They want to learn business and entrepreneurship, so that they can create a business of their own.”
To prepare young people for the future of work, Generation Unlimited partners young people with the private sector, government, multilateral organisations, and civil society.
Creatable was originally founded in response to a lack of diverse applicants to an engineering job at FINCH’s technology arm. Its initial STEM-based innovation course was first rolled out in Australian schools Kambala and SCEGGS Darlinghurst. While the course had an impact on the students, Creatable realised that the model lacked scalability and the potential to create a global watershed for education. So it pivoted to become a subscription-based business that offers teachers professional development in order to make innovation accessible to young people, in particular those usually left out of the worlds of tech and STEM.
To reach the greatest number of Burundian students, Creatable teaches the teacher, developing a teaching manual, student textbook, training videos, while empowering local facilitators. It sees teachers as the forgotten heroes of the education system who, when empowered by current industry knowledge, can provide their students with the soft skills required to become innovators and transform their worlds.
After the success of Stage One of the Pilot Programme, Burundi’s Ministry of Education adopted the Rocket Stove course, and is collaborating with Creatable to develop further modules while UNICEF has committed to rolling out the programme in a range of country offices and refugee camps.
