Startup EduTech helps Costa Rica government reduce school

dropout and improve education

The COVID-19 pandemic showed that technology can be a

powerful tool in education – online systems allowed students to
migrate to home schooling in a matter of weeks as governments
tried to contain the spread of the virus. But much more can be
done.

With high dropout rates, Costa Rica engaged with startup EduTech
de Centro America to design, develop and implement a Student
Registration and Early Warning System, which allows for the
transmission of data alerts that help the education system react to
risks that can affect students’ achievements.

“In the first quarter [of 2020], 90,000 students were not in our
schools because we went from face-to-face service to a virtual
service so we could react very quickly,” said Rafael Ramirez
Pacheco (pictured, right), product manager at the Costa Rica
Ministry of Education. “The idea was to locate where students
were and in the next four months we could reduce the dropout
from 90,000 students to 18,000 … students. After that, we
initiated another stage to retrieve those 18,000 students back to
school.”

The project won the “Best Startup Delivering Innovation” award in

2021 from Amazon Web Services Inc.

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Pacheco and Josue Montero (pictured, left), founder and president
of EduTech de Centro America, spoke with Natalie Erlich, host of
the CUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during
the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. They
discussed the problems facing Costa Rica’s education system, the
extensive technology program developed by EduTech, and the
goals the program intends to achieve.

From paper-based data collection to the cloud

A major difficulty faced by Costa Rica in dealing with the high

dropout rate was that the local education system relied on paper-
based data collection.

“We would gather the collect data in paper and take that to the
central office, and this would enter into an excel file,” Pacheco
explained. “This [would] take around two months to process all
this data and make decisions.”

Thus, the first thing done with EduTech was to digitally record the
number of students — it was possible to obtain enrollment data
for 1,163,982 students, involving the entire educational
population, both public and private. All data was stored in the AWS
cloud.

With a file for each student, the government can track abstentions,
as well as everything that the student does in the different
academic years, and, in this way, design more suitable curricula.

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“We can identify the lacks, the weaknesses, and we can see which
are the programs that are more appropriate so as to replicate this
in the rest of the country,” Pacheco stated.

One of the most important aspects of the program is that it involves

students from all levels of education: kindergarten, preschool,
primary school, secondary school, higher education and technical
education. “We’ve reached every single sector where the Ministry
of Education was able to detect where there was a need in the
country,” he added.

AWS Recognition for undocumented student

The program developed by EduTech for the Ministry of Education

of Costa Rica has eight stages and promises to bring on board
different types of technology. One tool that will likely be adopted
is AWS Recognition, to solve the problem of undocumented
students.
As many students in the country do not have any type of
identification, it is extremely difficult for the education system to
monitor their presence and performance. The idea is to use the
technology to recognize their faces or fingerprints, giving them an
identification, according to Montero.

“It’s amazing technology that allows the Ministry of Education and

the students to have a voice, to have a presence even though they
don’t have their actual documentation because of whatever

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reason,” Montero said. “It can change people’s life, and it can
change students’ lives.”

Connectivity and cloud-based services also tend to spread to other

Costa Rican government agencies, and some ministries have
already incorporated some tools for managing COVID-19. The
Ministry of Health, for example, has a set of apps to identify who
tests positive for the virus, and this has allowed the Ministry of
Education to associate the situation with students in the
classroom, according to Pacheco.

“AWS has a set of services that allow us to focus on the problem

instead of the solution or the technology, because the services are
already available,” he concluded.

Source: https://siliconangle.com/2021/07/02/startup-edutech-helps-
costa-rica-government-reduce-school-dropout-improve-education-
awspublicsectorawards/