Self-Reliance for Her

Vulnerable women in Latin America are lacking adequate life and workplace skills which are preventing them from becoming self-reliant. Refugee women are especially excluded since they are less likely to have the skills they need to independently flourish in their new communities. We propose two programs to help women acquire, retain and flourish in their jobs: a web-based app to teach basic life skills, including financial literacy, women’s rights, nutrition, health and hygiene, and a guided apprenticeship program to teach personal development and workplace development. Both programs will be conducted in Spanish and adapted to the hyper-local context of where each program will run like, adapting employment skills training to the region. The app collects anonymised basic demographic information to help local governments and humanitarian/development service providers determine needs-assessment based on geographic location. Both programs can be adapted to serve the needs of the local population subject to vulnerability.

One of the biggest challenges refugee women face is adapting to their new environment and becoming self-reliant. This means learning how to thrive in a new culture, that requires new skills, for themselves and sometimes even for their families. Latin America (LATAM) and the Caribbean are currently hosting 3.7 million of the 4.5 million Venezuelan refugees, with the promise to grow exponentially within 2020. Many countries within this region, such as Colombia, have prepared to continuously accept displaced refugees during Venezuela’s crisis. While refugees are trying to stabilize in their new communities, both children, adults, and their caregivers may not have the access to getting the education and proper tools they need in order to thrive in that environment. It’s especially important to monitor the youth and women population of migration. Women are still affected by discrimination everywhere, therefore they will have limited access and resources to a lot of things. In this case, there are 42% of Venezulan female refugees and 32% of them are affected by discrimination. If these women are caregivers, how are they meant to care for their families with limited education and resources? This app could provide them the resources they need to thrive.

Our solution serves Spanish-speaking refugee women. When the women go onto the mobile-based course, before they begin utilizing the tools and resources, they are asked demographic information, including country of origin, current location (based on zip code, not specific address), household composition, education/work experience and prior knowledge related to course topics (i.e. financial literacy, nutrition, etc) . The data collected is anonymized and used to help service and emergency providers plot the needs of their beneficiaries based on location, helping policy makers, NGOS, local employers, and us, the course creators, thoroughly understand and accurately provide community needs. This helps provide real-time needs-assessment data to service providers and eliminate service redundancies - for example, the data might show that in a certain zip code would benefit from 2 new elementary education facilities, while in another zip code only a high-school program is needed, rather than creating 1 of each grade program in both zip codes. The data collected also helps adapt our content and create new modules based on the feedback and progression between pre-test/post-test of each module.

Our solution is a web-based application that offers critical training to refugee women and a backend data tool that voluntarily collects demographics, providing real-time needs-assessment information to governments and humanitarian/development service providers.  Specifically, we propose two programs to help women acquire, retain and flourish in their jobs: a web-based app to teach basic life skills, including financial literacy, women’s rights, nutrition, health and hygiene, and a guided apprenticeship program to teach the technical skills needed, including resume building, acing an interview and online project management tools. Having access to the demographics gives us access to where the “need” is, which can direct us to the areas in which refugee women need us the most and adapt it to a hyper-local context. The basic life skills we are teaching are essential to understand how to take care of themselves and workplace development are topics as simple as resume building and how to get a job, to the more complex individual’s rights and responsibilities, how to get promoted and salary budget management.

Our program is the only web-based solution that provides anyone with lower literacy rates a simple, educational toolkit focused on achieving self-reliance, and is the first real-time data provider for needs assessment programs delivered to refugee populations in transit. Its low cost (0.05USD per user) and mobile-based delivery allow for fast scalability, ease of delivery to the end user (who does not need to travel or take time off from family to attend in-person courses), is easy to adapt to different languages and can include geo-specific information. The course was created for refugee and trafficked women, but the material itself is useful for all vulnerable populations, including male and female refugees, youth without guardians, lower-income households and those subject to domestic violence. The demographic information we record allows access to real time census statistics, which can help inform policy-making, and adapt the services of emergency responders and refugee-support organizations.

One of the critical challenges to refugee women in overcoming vulnerability is accessing the knowledge they need to be able to fully integrate in their new communities, and acquire the skills to be able to access, apply and retain employment to become self-reliant. Most often, these women cannot afford to pay for skills-acquisition courses, simply do not know what knowledge they are missing and cannot travel or leave individuals under their care (such as children or elderly) to conduct non-revenue producing activities, such as take a course. At the same time, UNHCR found a majority of refugees from Venezuelan owned or had access to a smartphone, meaning the delivery of a mobile-based program is effective in capturing a large user base, to complete the course material at their own pace and provide the backend data.

We have completed a pilot with 30 English and Spanish-speaking refugees in the DC-Maryland-Virginia regions of the US, are able to immediately add 500 new English-speaking users and 150 new Spanish-speaking users per month at a cost of 0.5$ per new user between May and August 2020, with the possibility of scaling to 15,000 new users per month at a cost of 0.35$ per new user in the next 5 years, totalling 180,000 new users per year with our current technology capabilities.

Within the next year, we want to deploy the full Spanish-language program in Colombia through our local partners and have 150 users per month complete the course and demographics between May-December 2020, totalling 1200 completed users and data points. We will also expand the deployment of the app in the US We will create additional courses, including technical skills, understanding online project management platforms and early childhood development. We plan to complete our course translation in French, Arabic, Albanian, Hausa and Pashto and launch the language-specific programs throughout our partner network, including the UNMCGY, ILO and UNHCR. We want to use the data-management backend tool to work with our local governments and refugee-based organizations to improve their service provisions by using our data collected through the completion of our online courses. Within the next five years, we want to connect and measure user statistics in real time, integrating tools such as AirTable, GIS and Groopit, which will allow for governments and humanitarian/development providers to understand more specific demographics based on zip codes. Once plotted geographically, service providers can know where to install new resources, like housing, child and education learning centers, workforce training programs, healthcare provisions, gender-based protection services, and others. All data will be anonymised to not be able to trace to the specific person providing it. We plan to expand the deployment to include the top-10 refugee hosting countries in the world. Lastly, we plan to create local content to support the specific needs of individual regions.

Over the course of the next year it will be difficult to reach all beneficiaries who can make use of the life skills course but do not have access to a smartphone. In addition, there is often internal mobility between refugee populations in Colombia, meaning an individual initially resettled in Cucuta might move on after a couple weeks to the Guajira region. In five years, we will need to overcome the challenge of monitoring and scaling a global team, while proving the hyper-local information integrated in the course materials. There might also be a reluctance on behalf of users to complete the course, so we will need to develop inherent incentives to do so, such as discount coupons to local grocery/market stores.

By providing project-sponsored Ipads and employing local 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 that could potentially enhance their workforce development too. The course implementers will 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.

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. Managing an international local team will be solved through the establishment of local country focal points responsible for deploying the materials through their local NGO and CSO partners, and managing the incentives platform through sub-regional focal points.

Our pilot with Spanish-speaking refugees in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia area was proved successful and we want to bring that material to Colombian regions with the highest number of Venezuelan refugees. We want to deploy the full Spanish-language program in Colombia through our local partners in Cartagena- La Guajira-Pamlona-Cucuta regions and have 150 users per month complete the course and the demographics between May and December of 2020, totalling 1200 completed users and data points to better understand the need of this region. As demonstrated in statistics mentioned, the count of refugees flowing from Venezuela, into nearby Latin American countries, is growing exponentially and will continue to grow at this rate.

There are 5 people on the team.

1. Lina Zdruli, CEO & Founder of Dafero, Founder and Board Member of Kura Foundation

2. Daniela Muhaj, Research Fellow at Harvard University and Board Member of Kura Foundation

3. Rachel Rowan, Social Impact Manager of Dafero and Board Member of Kura Foundation

4. Nicolas Garcia Mayor, Founder of CMAX

5. Jack Silverman, Social Impact staff at Dafero and Kura Foundation

Lina Zdruli is passionate about using business as a tool for social good and has experience working with forced displacement livelihoods, specifically at the World Bank where she worked for the Conflict Fragility and Violence team helping bridge the humanitarian-development divide for refugees and internally displaced persons. She completed her Masters at Georgetown University, focused on private sector solutions for refugee employment. She also created VRefugees, a virtual reality simulation of a refugee’s journey from Syria to Germany as an educational and impact tool. 

Daniela Muhaj is a G20 Young Global Changer along with Lina and a research fellow at the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab at Harvard University. She is enthusiastic about behavioral economics to diagnose economic issues to inform effective policy making. Her research specialties include labor economics and structural reforms. 

Rachel Rowan studies victimology at Stockton University, was a member of a New Jersey-based task force specialized in gender-based violence, advising on refugee programs and evidence-based practices and worked at a homeless shelter. 

Nicolas Garcias is an industrial designer with a focus in humanitarian development who has had direct experience in working with refugees through CMAX, a prototype to provide immediate housing because he wanted to improve the lives of those affected by natural catastrophes and humanitarian crises. 

Jack Silverman is a law student at Georgetown University, specializing in family law, and previously worked at the Cook County State Attorney’s Human Trafficking division in Chicago, prosecuting human traffickers and aiding victims throughout the legal process.

• Both United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and International Labour Organization (ILO) will help co-create hyper-local content and spread the application through their beneficiaries.
• United Nations Major Group for Children & Youth (UNMGCY) will help co-create information for youth-specific vulnerable communities and help spread the application through their NGO and partner network
• Both Venezolanos en Pamplona and Rotary Pamplona are our direct NGO support in Colombia. They will help implement all of our programs directly to the Venezuelan refugees in Colombia. 
• Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area (LSS/NCA), Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington, Ethiopian Community Services and Develop Council (ECDC), and the International Rescue Committee (IRC), all help distribute all of our content directly, as well as help translate our content into multiple languages.
• Afghan Academy helps translate our content and distribute our content directly to local Afghan refugees. 
• Computer CORE helps with the improvement of our technical applications and helped us understand user experience locally for resource creation.
• Golden Beacon USA supports us in co-creation of content.
• Realri Integrated Development (Ecobarter) will help co-create hyper-local content and handle the distribution of our programs in Nigeria and their relevant partner networks.

To remain financially sustainable we will receive consistent and incremental funds from our private sector partner, the Dafero Social Enterprise, who has provided the funds for the creation of the entire web-based course, the translations and the expansion of the material in the US, Nigeria and Colombia. We will also sell the census data collected through the course completion to governments, international organizations and service providers to be able to fund the program expansion across geographies, on a subscription based-model.

We will achieve financial sustainability by year 2, when we are able to sell the user data and information analysis to service providers to cover the total cost of $3900 for 7800 beneficiaries to complete the mobile-based course, $5000 for the data-development and web-service hosting and $15,000 in travel and employment stipends for course implementers.

We are applying for this challenge because our pilots were successful, so it would be best to expand our solution to where there are larger numbers, such as Latin America, where there are millions of Venezuelan refugees. We would love to be able to gain access to the resources that the MIT challenge can offer, as well as receiving funding for our solution by winning. The funding we receive by winning this challenge will be used to pay for the online course for each user, tablets to combat our technology barrier, the hiring of local women in the communities to facilitate the distribution of the online course on the tablets in the field,  and the hiring of an apprenticeship instructor. 

We know that by having the opportunity to expand within the MIT network, we will have access to so many partnerships to help make a difference. For example, MIT has a partnership with Vodafone Americas Foundation, which is an organization that has a program that focuses on social change through technology for the empowerment of women and girls. With this organization’s aim, we believe through their investments and being able to partner and connect with them, would give us the opportunity to grow and expand our solution for women and girls to thrive and excel globally. We believe that not only could they become an asset to our goal in helping refugee women, but we could become an asset for their goals too since our solution aligns with their goals.

Our solution would also benefit from additional connections in the local governments in the Cartagena-La Guajira-Pamplona-Cucuta regions, partnerships with data collection platforms and local businesses who can help provide incentives for the online platform completion on behalf of beneficiaries (such as vouchers to local corner stores and supermarkets like OXXO or Metro) and employment opportunities after the apprenticeship completion.

• Groopit, a SaaS solution for collecting real-time data and organizing people who don’t work directly in our unit. This tool can help us manage our data collection platform across all global partners.
• The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). We would like to partner with them because they could be valuable in their resources to expand our audience to include more childrens-based refugee education too, and to better understand international relationships with vulnerable people.
• iMMAP is an organization focused on information, knowledge, and change management skills directly linked to humanitarian crisis and emergency response. This organization has a wide variety of services like infographics and data collection that could help us better understand the humanitarian impact of where the refugees are and how to provide high-quality assistance to this population, especially on a large scale.
• Global Protection Cluster. It’s an organization that works at a global-level of coordinating protective responses during complex and natural disaster humanitarian emergencies. They work on a large scale, tackling humanitarian issues such as gender-based violence, human rights, and working with children. Their wide range of services can help our services expand as a whole.
• Accenture Development Partnership - this organization is focused on new technologies and business modules to transform international development to serve vulnerable populations. This partnership could help our solution be distributed to vulnerable populations in need, especially since they have completed global development projects across 90 countries.