Above: Tara Chklovski, Founder of Technovation Girls
When she was just 16 years old, Javiera Geraldo would board a bus in her hometown of Coquimbo, Chile, at midnight on Fridays for the 450-kilometre journey to the historic port city of Valparaiso. After attending classes all day, she would get back on a bus for the return trip.
For a year before she started taking those buses, she earned money selling various things and doing odd jobs to save up the fare. And she persuaded her mother that taking an overnight bus on her own to a city far away would be fine, and worth the effort and her mom’s worry.
“I told her, ‘I want to do a program in an unknown city with unknown people in an unknown institution,’” Geraldo, now 18, said in an interview. “No problem, right?”
With her mother’s permission, Geraldo undertook those lengthy trips to take part in Technovation Girls, a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) program that wasn’t available in Coquimbo at the time. Technovation empowers girls in countries around the world to become leaders, technology innovators and problem-solvers.
Javiera Geraldo
Over the course of the 12-week tech entrepreneurship program, girls aged eight to 18 work with mentors to identify problems in their community and develop technology-based solutions and businesses to address those problems. The girls learn coding, how to use artificial intelligence and develop apps, and they acquire the skills to successfully pitch their innovations and business plans.
“One of the most important things I got from Technovation, in addition to the knowledge and the technical skills, was the inspiration to believe in myself, to believe that I can actually make an impact in the world,” said Geraldo, who has received a scholarship to help her attend university in the United States. “It changed my life.”
Big problems, big solutions
Technovation was the brainchild of Tara Chklovski, an aerospace engineer in Los Angeles. She was working for a company that designed airplanes in the early 2000s when they began to build military drones. She didn’t want to do that, so she set out on a new path. She asked herself: what are the big problems in the world, and what are the big solutions?
“One of the big problems I found was that in a time when you can go to the moon and you can connect with people across the world, where you're born still determines your potential,” Chklovski said.
She started an education non-profit, then called Iridescent, in 2006, whose goal was “to bring the most cutting-edge technologies, the world's best education, to the most underrepresented communities,” she said. It offered virtual courses and mentoring, and launched one of the first education games on iPhone and an AI education program in 2017, long “before people were really talking about AI,” she said.
Technovation Girls was launched in 2010 and has since gone global, with girls from more than 160 countries having participated. Since its launch, more than 160,000 girls have gone through the program, supported by 21,000 volunteers trained as mentors and facilitators.
Scotiabank is supporting Technovation with a $500,000 investment over three years to help the program expand in Chile and Mexico. The Bank’s donation, part of its $500 million ScotiaRISE community investment initiative to help people reach their potential, will directly impact nearly 1,470 girls, engage 1,770 alumnae, and mobilize 300 volunteers in Mexico and Chile.
“We’re proud to support Technovation’s mission to empower girls to become leaders and problem-solvers in Mexico and Chile,” said Meigan Terry, Senior Vice President & Chief Corporate Affairs and Sustainability Officer. “This program will significantly increase many girls’ self-confidence, financial literacy, and AI-entrepreneurship knowledge, and in the long term enhance their career opportunities, financial stability, and earning power.”
“The mission of actually inspiring girls is the triumph of Technovation.”
Program backed by research
The formula for Technovation Girls was backed by deep research and experience.
“Over the years we experimented extensively and looked at the data about what results in long-term change and actually allows people to reach their full potential,” Chklovski said. “And what resulted was this model, where girls work in an all-girls team, supported by mentors from industry, and together they find a problem in their community and then they either they make a mobile app or an AI prototype and launch it as a business.
“They're learning all the mechanics of competitor research, user research, figuring out all the ethical elements of it and then pitching it, marketing it, and then getting up on stage and pitching to investors. And so that whole experience is a three-month accelerator experience and it's transformational.”
Although many alumnae of Technovation Girls have gone on to start their own tech businesses or work in STEM at some of the world’s biggest tech companies, Chklovski says the apps or ventures the participants create in the program are not the ultimate goal.
“Our product is not the app, it's the girl herself,” she said. “These are the kinds of people that you would bend over backwards to get onto your team because they're fearless. They know how to bring their unique ideas and perspectives and they're very familiar with cutting-edge technologies and unafraid to learn.”
Javiera is a prime example of that. She said she learned resilience from her mother, a single parent who attended university while raising her children, and taught her that she has to give back to her community. Technovation helped give her the skills and confidence to do just that.
She is now a student ambassador for Technovation, helping spread the word in Chile about the opportunities for learning and growth that the program provides — including in her hometown, where it is now available.
After attending university in the U.S. — her dream would be to attend Stanford University — she wants to return to Chile and continue to help her own community.
Her ultimate goal is to use biotechnology and genetic engineering to make ophthalmological treatments more accessible.
“The mission of actually inspiring girls is the triumph of Technovation,” Geraldo said. “It gives you the power to believe in yourself and then consequently to make a change in the world and to inspire others to do that. You realize that we're all on this path of making the world a better place.”
