Expo Live is a dedicated $100 million fund to support projects with innovative, creative solutions to pressing challenges around the world – helping to improve people’s lives, preserve the planet, or both.
The Innovation Impact Grant Programme, which has completed five cycles to date, is already supporting 140 grantees from 76 countries. The programme has an allocation of up to $100,000 per project, as well as expert advice and the opportunity to share ideas with a global audience.
Expo Live projects strive for solutions across 14 different sectors, including agriculture, education, environment, employment, energy and healthcare as organisers look for projects that would not reach their full potential without its support.
In the first of a three-part series of articles, Arabian Business talks exclusively to Federico Bello, director of Boki, an innovative digital application, which includes challenging and really funny activities and exercises, that help kids to learn while enjoying, in a didactic, playful and interactive way at school or at home.
Tell me about the project: when was it set up? How many people are involved? Where does it operate?
Boki was created in October 2018 in Uruguay. We started with five people, and today we are a multi-disciplinary team of 12. Boki has operations in Latin America (LATAM) – in Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay.
Why was it set up?
Teachers need help to motivate students with fundamental learning, and for this reason, they often rely on digital resources. To select and prepare the basic digital material, they spend several hours and many times they fail to make it interactive and much less gamified to enthuse their students.
Offering better experiences is a challenge faced by governments and private educational centres globally, and this problem has increased much more with the Covid-19 pandemic. According to world-wide statistical data from UNESCO, there are more than 700 million students in public and private schools, more than 600 million high-school students, and more than 200 million in universities. We find more than 32 million teachers in primary education, more than 35 million in secondary education, and more than 13 million in universities.
In summary, in the world, there are more than 80 million teachers in different educational centres that give classes to about 1.5 billion students.
What is the mission of the organisation? Who is it designed to help?
We enjoy helping children to be better prepared for their future, have access to a better quality of life, and empower them to build a more humane world. Boki offers the possibility of generating stunning presentations (such as Genially) based on educational content from different publishers with whom we make agreements (such as Spotify).
Teachers, in a simple way, select the text to include, can edit it and combine it with quizzes (such as Kahoot) and games (such as Matific) in a smart way to increase interactivity in class, motivating students to connect more, completing the activities from their digital devices, and seeing the results in real-time.
How will the grant from Expo Live help? What will it be used for?
The Expo Live grant allows us to be better prepared to increase our market share in LATAM, and also to explore new opportunities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Mainly, we are using it to include new features, to fine-tune our content, and to increase our commercial and marketing activities.
We are convinced that this will help us to reach more teachers and educational centres, and generate new commercial relationships with publishers to increase our catalogue.
What are the future plans for the organisation?
Today, Boki has more than 10,000 users, and we aim to finish 2021 with close to 100,000 users. We want to consolidate in LATAM in the short-term and then grow to other regions. We are very motivated to positively impact the lives of millions of students.
This year we will be present at Expo 2020 Dubai, which gives us the confidence to grow at the pace of our dreams.
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