WHAT WORKS:
EDUC.AR'S STRATEGY FOR A NATION CONNECTED AND LEARNING


EXECUTIVE SUMMARY


THE ARGENTINE GOVERNMENT and some dedicated entrepreneurs have set out to transform the national education system through the Educ.ar project. The goal is to provide a nationally and internationally competitive education to all Argentine students by connecting every Argentine school to the Internet, training every teacher in its use, and providing an entire national curriculum online. Educ.ar, structured as a novel public-private collaboration, is already being replicated in Chile and other Latin American countries.

BUSINESS MODEL
Educ.ar is based on a three pillar strategy:

•Connectivity: The connectivity plan provides computer equipment and online access for 40,000 Argentine schools by 2004.
•Capacity: The capacity-building program will train 550,000 school teachers in the use and creation of digital content and media-tools for the classroom.
•Content: The Educ.ar portal (www.educ.ar) provides quality educational content for teachers and students and filtered access to the Internet via a digital network.

The connectivity plan and the capacity-building program are direct activities of the Ministry of Education, financed through the government and multilateral loans to the government. The Educ.ar portal is an entrepreneurial enterprise based in Buenos Aires which plans to generate revenues through advertising, e-commerce, and corporate sponsorships; for the time being, Educ.ar is wholly-owned by the government, but operates as a private enterprise. The benefits of the structure are clear, with the government assuming the costs of connectivity and training, paving the way for Educ.ar to provide high quality services to the education market. The challenges are clear as well: connecting and training an entire national school system is an audacious pursuit. On Educ.ar's part, generating revenue for self-sufficiency is no easy task, especially given the collapse of many online advertising revenue models.

INFRASTRUCTURE
Argentina's telecommunications infrastructure is concentrated in and around Buenos Aires. Even so, Internet access is limited and expensive even in urban Argentina, in large part because of high telecommunications charges. Internet access is not available at all in much of the country's rural areas and would be prohibitive over the existing phone network because of long distance charges. Overcoming these difficulties to provide affordable access to 40,000 schools is just the beginning of Educ.ar's infrastructure challenge. Some 1,700 schools do not even have electricity, and many lack adequate resources of all kinds. More broadly, Argentina's 37 million population is scattered across a landscape one-third the size of the United States. Installation and maintenance of equipment for rural schools will be costly and difficult. With two-thirds of the country's population now unable to access the Internet, online training programs and online content distribution will have to wait on infrastructure improvements.

HUMAN CAPACITY
Key to the success of Educ.ar is a talented management team, including expatriate Argentines attracted back from Europe to participate. Educ.ar is also building strategic alliances with technology companies and benefiting from pro-bono help from corporations and educational institutes. Much of the technical work will be outsourced to minimize in-house staff and access the most capable talent.

At the same time, building human capital in the schools is a critical challenge for Educ.ar. Most school teachers in Argentina are neither familiar with the Internet nor trained in the use of multi-media technologies for the classroom. Teacher training on the scale that Educ.ar contemplates-upgrading an entire nation of teachers within a few years-is a daunting task. The online training models that Educ.ar counts on cannot begin to function until infrastructure problems are solved.

POLICY
There is inherent risk in the long-term health of any government project or state-owned enterprise. Changing economic circumstances can prompt budget cuts, and a shift in control of the government might also result in different policy priorities. To minimize this risk, the enterprise partner to the project, Educ.ar, has negotiated external funding packages that extend beyond the time period of government budgets and require matching Ministry funds. Its Board of Directors spans the political spectrum, with representation from all of the most-probable candidates for president. There is precedent in Argentina for successful and long-enduring state-owned companies. And Educ.ar is building support within provinces and constituencies to guarantee its long-term health.

ENTERPRISE
Educ.ar, the private sector partner in the Educ.ar project, was launched in 2000 by Martín Varsavsky, an expatriate Argentine and successful e-commerce entrepreneur in Europe, with a personal donation of US$11,282,855 (one dollar for each K-12 student in Argentina). Educ.ar will not only provide educational content to Educ.ar but will provide Internet services to Educ.ar, in effect operating the online school network. It plans to tap the e-commerce and advertising revenue potential of a captive market of some 11 million students and teachers, as well as to expand these and its ISP services beyond the student and teacher population. Although wholly owned by the government, Educ.ar may also raise capital through a public offering of its shares at some future time.

Educ.ar also hopes to benefit from partnering in content creation, hosting, and connectivity solutions with a growing network of "Educ.ars" being created throughout Latin America by the Martín Varsavsky Foundation. The Chilean version, the state-owned and run Enlaces program, is already up and running. The network provides clear opportunities for economies of scale, from buyers group and coalition negotiations to joint content acquisition and sharing.

KEY LESSONS
It is too early to know whether Educ.ar can accomplish its ambitious goals. What is clear is that without the radical shift to online distribution channels for training and educational content delivery that Educ.ar is building, Argentina's schools are likely to continue to decline. Educ.ar's founders go further and assert that Educ.ar is about more than education-it is an attempt to address basic problems of inequity that weaken Argentine society by enabling equal access and equal opportunity. At the very least, Educ.ar is an unusual attempt to build a public-private partnership, financed in part with an e-commerce business model, to catalyze multi-sectoral, non-partisan support of ongoing educational reform.

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