Life Skills App

Refugee women are lacking adequate workplace skills that are preventing them from enhancing their quality of life. The solution we are proposing is an app to teach basic life skills, workforce development, and technical skills. This includes education on financial literacy, women’s rights, nutrition, health and hygiene, and early childhood development; technical skills that includes understanding online productivity platforms, managing tools, and project management, and workforce development that includes resume building, how to adapt in the workplace, and how to ace an interview. Our app could enhance the lives of people in any location or situation. Refugee women were missing the proper skills and training, and this app is here to help them develop those skills to set them up for success.

One of the biggest challenges refugee women go through is adaptation. They must adjust to a completely different environment than what they’ve been used to prior. This means adjusting to the culture and attaining the proper skills to thrive in that environment. Our app has the potential to make refugee women’s adjustment to the new environment simpler, less stressful, and full of education to give them the confidence to grow. We are providing them the tools of enhancing their financial literacy, understanding their nutrition required and health and hygiene, as well as understanding women’s rights. Our app also has the potential to prepare these women for the workplace, which is also another environment that they must adapt too. It also has the ability to teach them about the different technologies that could be used in the workplace, or for themselves, like project management, or online platforms that look great on a resume. We have the ability to constantly add additional resources and skills to the app for when more consistent problems arise. This solution is relevant for any refugee with a change of environment and the need to adapt.

Our solution is serving refugee women. When the women go onto the app, before they begin utilizing the tools and resources, they will be asked to give their demographics, their zip code, and some basic questions of what they know, versus don’t know, in relevance of the app. The data provided will be mapped out, and used to help policy makers, employers, and us, the app creators, thoroughly understand the community needs that needed to be enhanced and provided. The solution will address their needs based on the beginning demographic questions asked.

Our solution is the life skills app. When an individual goes onto the app, they’ll be asked demographic questions. Having access to the demographics, gives us access to where the “need” is. This can direct us right to the areas in which refugee women need us the most. The basic life skills we are teaching are essential to understand how to take care of themselves. While we have already developed a lot of the modules and what information we think are essential, we’re going to build on workplace development and technical skills that are essential with how technology is constantly evolving. Workplace development are topics as simple as resume building and how to get a job, and are more complex into an individual’s rights and responsibilities in the workplace, and how to get promoted. It’s also important to equip these women with technology skills. It could strive them into independence of entrepreneurship, create additional skills for them to have, and build on their resume, which could be even more useful for them landing a job. Technology skills could be anything from understanding online productivity tools, management tools, and even how to have good project management skills, which is better utilized through technology. Any skills that this app could provide and teach them could benefit refugee women in some way, shape or form. As for the technological side to this, the app is done through Talentlms, and all of our material is located on that. It can be accessed through web, or mobile app download as well. Our modules are very easily uploaded, and our modules are created to be very easy for most consumers.

Our solution is the only app-based solution that provides anyone with lower literacy rates, an educational, simple toolkit on self reliance. It is low cost to implement, and easier access for several people who do not seek in-person self reliance education. Even though our goal audience is mostly for refugee women, technically anyone who seeks to simply educate themselves on life skills with the goal to enhance their quality of life, could use this app. Our app is meant to record demographics and zipcode as well, so integrating data collection in the backend, will provide governments and service providers, access to real time census statistics which can help inform policy making legislators, emergency responders, and refugee-based organizations about the needs of our refugees.

A majority of key learning for people in general is done in-person, or maybe even on the web. Providing easy access to life skill enhancements, workforce development, and training on upcoming and more advanced technological skills, through an app, could give the individual the opportunity to refer back as much as they’d like and at their choice of pace.

We completed a small test pilot with 30 people, and only the topics within life skills. This app is infinitely scalable, at the cost of 0.5 per new user. 

Our goals within this year are to finish all of the life skill modules for the app. As of now, we have financial literacy, nutrition, and health & hygiene fully prepared in English. We have the goal of starting/completing the rest of the modules, including, technical skills, and workforce development. We also want to have our modules fully translated into Spanish, French, Arabic, Albanian, and Pashto. Once all of our modules are completed and uploaded on our app, we want to prepare to launch the pilot again additional feedback.

Our goal within the next 5 years is to implement a back-end to measure user statistics, which will allow for governments and humanitarian providers to understand the specific demographics based on zip codes. Specifically, the demographics registered will include gender, education levels, need for healthcare solutions, child support needs, shelter access, workforce information and any other needs of the population. The data will be registered once the user logs onto the course and be plotted automatically based on geographies, so service providers can know where to install new temporary or long-term housing, child and education learning centers, workforce training programs, healthcare provisions, gender-based protection services, and others. The estimation of the zip code can either be input manually or taken from GPS coordinates (which will only register the zip code, not the specific location of the person, for privacy concerns) if the user permits it. All data will be anonymous to not trace it to the specific person providing it.

There is the probability that not all beneficiaries who can make use of the life skills course have access to a smartphone. In addition, there is often internal mobility between refugee populations.

By providing project-sponsored iPads and employing refugee and host populations to help implement the courses with the iPads. This will allow us to overcome the technology barrier for displaced refugee women who do not have access to a smartphone as well as provide much-needed local jobs. The course implementers will be primarily women, work in groups of 2 and 3 to guarantee their personal safety and be tracked by additional GPS services. Provided project funding, they can be accompanied by female security personnel. The incentives for the refugee women to take the course, in addition to the importance of the material itself, is providing cash-transfer vouchers upon successful completion of the entire course. 

It is also possible to expand the course to include text-based learning, which would allow for anyone with a regular phone to complete the course as well as provide their census information to improve service provision.

Lastly, it is possible to include follow-up services and push notifications when adding new courses, and offer similar incentives (cash-transfer bonuses, etc) to take the new course as well as update census data on their new needs based on the new zip code transferred to.

Lina Zdruli, Founder

Daniela Muhaj

Rachel Rowan

Nicolás García Mayor

Selling the census data (anonymized) to ensure sustainability of education programs

Cost of .5 per new user and 3$ if completing course with iPad