Juanita Rivera

Colombian edtech pioneer bridging Latin America's digital divide through mobile learning

Juanita Rivera is a Colombian educator and founder of AprendeApp, a mobile learning platform that has provided over 3 million students in Latin America with free access to STEM education since 2019. Her vision of democratizing education led to the development of offline-capable apps containing 10,000+ interactive lessons in Spanish, Portuguese, and indigenous languages. During the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, Rivera's team partnered with UNICEF to distribute 500,000 low-cost tablets preloaded with their curriculum.

In 2022, she launched the Tecnología Educativa initiative to train 10,000 teachers across rural Colombia in digital pedagogy. Her work has been recognized by Forbes Latin America's 30 Under 30 and earned a $1.2 million grant from the Gates Foundation's Global Learning Accelerator. Rivera also co-founded the Latinoamérica Educativa network connecting 200+ edtech startups in the region. Her TED Talk emphasizes mobile technology's potential to transform education systems in low-income communities. Currently, she's developing AI-powered adaptive learning systems tailored for multilingual learners in collaboration with MIT's Media Lab.