Using the device to encourage people to engage beyond the device: EY STEM Tribe encourages users to actively engage with their ecosystem to enable social integration.
Technology for social good: EY STEM Tribe shifts the power back in the hands of young people by using technology as a positive force for good.
Trust at the heart: Data gathering by the platform is utilized only to measure social impact without compromising personal data and identity.
Gamification, game theory and behavioural economics: The platform is designed to incentivize users through a fun experience to engage and act based on what they like and what they care about.
Diverse and global public-private partnership: The trust-based ecosystem has created a powerful partnership activating multiple stakeholders in different geographies - governments, academic institutions, schools, teachers, parents, non-profits and corporations – working towards a common goal: Future is Equal.

Current status of EY STEM Tribe
Phase 1 is underway, completing at the end of March 2020. 7000 girls aged 13-18, across 50+ schools in 3 major cities and 2 countries are participating. 30+ partner organizations form the ecosystem. The Government of Delhi is engaged and supporting girl participation. More than 20,000 learning steps have been completed by girls to date. The most popular rewards have been Virtual Reality Headsets, Work Experiences with EY, donations to charities (Girls who Code and AI for Good).

What is happening across the EY STEM Tribe program right now
The platform is operational and impact is being measured on a monthly basis, sharing key (anonymised) insights with ecosystem partners. In parallel, EY and Tribal Planet are finalizing the plans for scaling EY STEM Tribe beyond March 2020 to more girls across geographies with more content and ecosystem partners across the public, private and non-profit sectors.

EY (Innovation sponsor & leader): Global scale and relationships to engage partners, governments and schools and drive the deployment.
Tribal Planet (Platform operator): Experience in content gamification and behavioural rewards.
Government of Delhi (Public Sector Partner): Credibility as advocate across schools and expertise on policy and learning outcomes.
Schools (Operational Girl Access): Direct access to girls to advocate adoption.
Academic institutions (Content Provider): Expertise in STEM.

Primary beneficiaries are the participating girls, caregivers/parents, teachers and schools who engaged in fun, gamified STEM learning enabling change in stereotypes.

Secondary beneficiaries: Government, which mobilised resources to drive public policy through partnership with private organisations. Content providers, who received feedback from app users. The non-profit organisations, which benefited through reward point induced monetary donations.

Key stakeholders are EY and Tribal Planet.

The impact measures are STEM impact (Interest, Competence, Value and Commitment), Future Career options awareness, Key transferable skills (Critical Thinking & Problem Solving Proficiency, Communication & Listening Proficiency, Creativity & Systems Thinking Proficiency, Social Skills & Team Work Proficiency, Leadership Proficiency). Activities are curated to assess ‘Before the Experience’ and ‘After the Experience’ measures for each indicator. The full results will not be published until end of March 2020: All indicators to date are positive.

Projections point to:
STEM Impact - Average positive 23% improvement.
Future Career Options Impact - 83% of girls have a better understanding of career options Transferable Skills Impact: Average increase of 18% of girls assessed as ‘high proficiency’.

Parental screen time and trust debate: Some parents are vocal about increased mobile usage. During initial onboarding convincing some schools was challenging since they had strict parent driven screen time policies. Subsequently, a successful campaign was conducted with schools, including awareness workshops with parents to listen, and explain how the platform was NOT a social media platform and how privacy was protected.

Gender (In)Equality: What about the boys? EY STEM Tribe is only for girls. This resulted in our failure to onboard a small number of co-ed schools (less than 10%). For the majority of co-ed schools, principals were re-engaged to explain our vision for girl-only platform and secured majority support.

Demanding school calendars: EY STEM Tribe launched with a series of workshops conducted with girls and their parents, teachers. Scheduling workshops for 50+ schools with different calendars and educational systems was challenging. With successful negotiation the schools prioritized our program.

Balancing a global-platform with local-relevance: EY STEM Tribe was delivered by a global team in local markets (Delhi, Atlanta and Seattle). Whilst core objectives, impact targets and the experience must be standard, content must be locally relevant to align with local culture, attitudes and education systems.

Trust and Privacy: A platform designed for young people must have clear policies around protecting the privacy of users and how data is processed and used.

Digital vs physical resource model: Phase 1 required significant resource-intensive interventions in deployment locations to engage early-adopter schools. With lessons learned, a focus for Phase 2 is to reduce manual interventions with schools and move towards more of a self-opt-in, self-service solution for school adoption through smart use of digital assets.

Government Collaboration: An expanded role of government for Phase 2 will be critical as the team seeks to rapidly scale the platform across a much larger number of schools.

Within EY: The program is sponsored by EY’s Global CEO. EY is a global organisation with 270,000+ people in over 150 countries. This network of employees, clients, alliances and vendors will be utilized to scale. Strong interest to scale has already been received from EY leadership and employees in other countries.

State and central government: The Delhi government has indicated a desire to scale EY STEM Tribe for more girls in government schools. Interest has also been received from other Indian states and the central government. Government partnerships outside of India are currently being explored for deployment in the next phase.

Other organisations: The innovative ecosystem-approach allows for a plug and play adoption model and there are numerous opportunities to on-board other corporations, non-profits and government entities. EY clients have expressed interest. Through Tribal Planet’s network, there are a number of high profile academic entities and NGOs exploring how to engage.

• Focus on building ‘trust’ for digital platforms that target young people.
• Invest significant time up front in defining a clear set of impact success metrics.
• Get the right balance between a global model that is locally relevant.
• Listen, learn and adapt: The experience and content must be continually refreshed to align with the interests of the user community.
• Invest resources up front to get the program off the ground, recognizing that the early adopter schools need more interventions than later-adopter schools (when the model is proven and fine-tuned).
• Marketing and communications have a key role to play in the success of innovations such as ours that requires activation of an ecosystem.
• Balancing stakeholders' diverse expectations with multiple ecosystem stakeholders is a key pillar of innovation success.
• With a plethora of girl/women-oriented programs, ‘Gender (In) Equality: What about the boys?’ is a statement which is often heard: Be careful in ensuring that girl/women-centric programs do not make the boys/men feel discriminated against.

EY STEM Tribe was nominated for UN Sustainable Development Action Awards in May 2019. Very good feedback was received on the initiative's design from UN SDG core team. UN SDG core team requested the EY team to lead a session with UN delegates at the UN SDG festival in Bonn on ‘Technology for Social Good’. Also, the team gave a talk as the change-makers at the SDG Studio (equivalent of a TED talk at the UN SDG festival).

‘Future of work’ modelled core team: EY STEM Tribe core team involved in the design, development and roll out comprises of EY and Tribal Planet team members from 6+ nationalities spread across 10+ different time zones. Remote working, that will soon become a norm, was the base of our working model.