In recent years, entrepreneurship has been all the rage, and most consider it easy money, but if you’re looking to start a successful business in the 21st century, you’ll need to have the right direction and will have to maintain drive and discipline. Entrepreneurship has played an integral part in sculpting the developed world that exists around us today. Though people might not have recognized its potential at the time, entrepreneurship can be traced back to almost 20,000 years, but it was not until the early 20th century when economists accredited it as one of the factors of production alongside land, labor, and capital. An entrepreneur is an innovator who comes up with new ideas and turns them into a business, bearing most of the profits and losses themselves.
Entrepreneurs have left their mark on many domains and disciplines, and one such domain is the education sector. This sector holds monumental significance as it is responsible for shaping young minds and the very future of our lives on this planet. It is commonly known that the education sector is slow in inculcating necessary change, but the work of these six entrepreneurs has been shifting narratives around contemporary education by revolutionizing the learning process for pupils around the globe.
- Ananya Agrawal – Call-a-Kahaani
Ananya has built an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform where users can interact with a story-based playground. The stories are profound real-life tales from a variety of people that are compiled into 4-minute narratives engrained with scenario-based questions. These tales and questions are designed to improve emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. These skills are essential for the future of educational leadership, which is vital for the development of any nation as it gives rise to innovators and entrepreneurs like Ananya. People are also able to call, record and share their own stories. Call-a-Kahaani is a platform that can be accessed using any mobile phone or landline, thus making it available to a large number of people in India.
- Shoriwa Shaun Benjamin – Learnable
Learnable is a learning management system that educators can use to curate and distribute high-quality lessons. This teaching assistant helps improve education in Africa in two ways: by making it easier for teachers to develop high-quality courses and providing engaging educational content to students in any language by using various technologies such as augmented reality, which can be used both in and out of class. It also consists of a bot based on Artificial Intelligence that can help teachers create and personalize courses. Augmented reality allows teachers to give students a first-hand and realistic experience of any object. This platform was created by Benjamin, a tech entrepreneur and is one of the names in the technological category of Forbes Africa #30under30 for his contributions.
- Regina Agustin – Tech-Voc Career Accelerator Program
The Tech-Voc Career Accelerator Program was created to increase employment opportunities in Tech-Voc for the youth in NEET (Not in Education, Employment and Training) in the Philippines. Tech-Voc is a non-formal form of education in the Philippines that focuses on hands-on and practical skills. The Tech-Voc Career Accelerator contains five online course activities that help students gain holistic and industry training, soft skills, and technical skills. Through this program, Agustin has created a job market for people who might have had difficulties with their careers or might not have a lucrative educational career.
- Gauthier Van Malderen & Matthew Davis – Perlego
Perlego is an online digital library created by two students who got the idea because, like many others, they also struggled to afford textbooks. Currently, Perlego hosts over 700,000 published works in their library. Their mission is to provide inexpensive or free resources to pupils around the world by slashing off distribution and print costs by collaborating with publishers. This solution helps improve the academic lives of students and saves authors and publishers from suffering losses.
- Nofi Bayu Darmawan – Komerce
Commerce is an online platform that connects employers from small villages to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Nofi Bayu Darmawan came up with Commerce for a plethora of reasons. The first and most important one is the lack of career opportunities in remote villages, especially in fields such as e-commerce. Commerce provides training to village youth and then lists them on their talent pool on the platform from where potential employers can recruit them. This solves the second problem of not finding skilled and well-trained employees for business ventures. This platform was created keeping in mind the rise in urbanization in Indonesia. Thanks to this innovative software, Darmawan received the Top Innovator award in 2021 on behalf of the World Economic Forum.
- Pam McNall – Respectfulways.com
Respectful Ways is a social-emotional learning educational program started by CNN journalist Pam McNall. She first got the idea when she heard her sister, who is a teacher, complain about her struggles with students’ behavioral issues. Pam crafted a curriculum based on emotional learning that helps children learn how to handle any social situation in the real world via effective tools such as storytelling. It also offers an online support feature for teachers to aid them in handling challenging situations with children in classrooms. Respectful Ways is essentially a character education program to fight adversity amongst students caused by bullying or personal life trauma.
Conclusion:
Fast-paced development in the education sector is critical. The pivotal change will only be observed if quality education is provided to students enrolled at top-tier educational institutions and those around the world regardless of status. As mentioned before, entrepreneurship is making this possible. Entrepreneurial skills allow people to think differently, provide unique solutions to problems, take risks, and sympathize with others. Such skills should be inculcated in curricula indefinitely from a young age so that more people are able to contribute to the world as these six entrepreneurs have done.
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