Bayoom Hub (BOH) is an incorporated social enterprise that builds learning systems to help communities stabilize and thrive. We are a collective of academics, researchers and field project people who have been brought together over many years. Our learning frameworks combine the wisdom of communities, knowledge of outside pressures and forces, collaborative inputs from the global world, the latest technology, and digital analysis.
Our team research extends over a decade. We pilot tested our learning system in Zambia with substantial success. See some video excerpts from our Zambians participants here. In 2019, BOH joined a grant with the University of Johannesburg that will move us into under-resourced communities in South Africa. We will increase the capacity of teachers to be catalysts of sustainable change at school, community and global levels.
The challenge
A global system of knowledge is beneficial to those who have access to networks – human, organizational and cyber. The same system also sidelines communities that are marginalized, have poor quality education and are losing their youngest, most promising members. Increasing levels of poverty, unemployment, ill health and loss of working age populations create a cycle of deteriorating resilience and adaptation.
Communities, however, have inherent strengths that are underutilized. They understand the local impact of global forces such as climate change, disease, population shifts, social and economic dynamics. They have existing social, political and economic systems that have adapted to modern challenges. They have young populations who are eager to learn and take advantage of new opportunities. Our community-based learning system takes advantage of their strengths and is aimed specifically at increasing resilience. It is built around learning incentives that aim to increase sustainability, and have positive returns to the global community.
The design
Bayoom Hub is a learning system that works as a teaching, facilitation, and partnership tool that guides communities to find solutions that work within local environments of culture, traditional knowledge and relationships.
In our approach the community identifies a problem and a group to work on the problem. BOH works with the community to define the problem and initial approach to sustainable change. BOH then expands the learning network to include specialists who collaborate to develop a learning/ investigation strategy. These BOH specialized teams move back and forth between our global hub (largely virtual) and the local community.
Click here for a one page description of Bayoom Hub for viewing, printing or downloading