AILEM

In Arabic AILEM is the word for knowledge and in Turkish it means family. AILEM is a phone app that includes an all-in-one language education and services tailored for refugees and asylum seekers to integrate into society.

Our students would be the refugees and asylum seekers of those who have just arrived in a new country or want to access free language education. The app is tailored specifically for refugees and asylum seekers, in teaching language and seeking help depending on the region and their experiences. 

The app can be easily scaled globally, in any region where refugees and asylum seekers have difficulties integrating into society.

AILEM is unparalleled with anything on the market. Invest in an app and project that is designed and tailored specifically for the target users and regions. AILEM cultivates, invests, and empowers an untapped population, helping create a stronger future for everyone.

According to the United Nations’ high commissioner of refugees, 37 million refugee children are out of school, and only 24% are enrolled in secondary education. Refugees spend years in these camps with no education, and thus struggle to integrate into the local educational system and the society, especially in Europe.

By far, language is typically the first and most direct challenge faced as they arrive in a foreign country. Through our survey with the refugee community we identified that listening and speaking help are the most in demand. External tutors can be expensive and some may not have the meals and time to travel into the city to attend classes, especially if they have to balance with work.

Being socially excluded or marginalized have the highest risk of poor health outcomes and results in poor self-esteem, lack of self-efficacy, stigmatization and homelessness.

The app's aim is to improve the confidence of conversing in a new language with elements specific to the situations that the refugees will have to face every day. We want to assist refugees and asylum seekers to find help in a new unfamiliar environment and ultimately easier transition into resettlement. This includes offline lessons and audio clips of basic phrases to communicate early on, adopting AI technology in order to have pronunciation coaching. The next feature is creating "meeting spaces" that students and teachers can virtually meet and answer questions in order for users to access teaching without paying.

Our aim is for users to feel empowered through knowledge in the long run.

Another part is the technical information and advice specifically for the region that the users reside in, we want to show employment advice, job openings that are verified, locations and openings of refugee centres, and more. 

Refugees spend months to several years waiting for refugee status, with no education and thus struggle to integrate into the local educational system and the society. We want to provide education directly to their phones.

Our solution directly engages with several SDG goals:

Goal 4 - Quality Education

• Providing education for refugees, especially those who do not have access and are out of school for years, especially asylum seekers waiting for the refugee status.

• Helping refugees reach further than primary education by integrating into the local system.

• Education is a basic human right. Education protects refugee children and youth from forced recruitment into armed groups, child labour, sexual exploitation and child marriage. Education can be used to empower refugees.

Goal 8 - Decent Employment

• Proper education can allow refugees to be able to gain good employment and sustain themselves.

• Job openings and advice to help aid refugees to enter the job market

• The app is aimed at prioritising hiring competent refugees in order to help them have access to income.

Goal 10 - Reduce inequality within and among communities

• Solving the inequality of access to education within the country, especially regarding income. Having access to secondary and tertiary education allows refugees to strive for higher paying jobs and not only be limited to lower paying work or even resorting to the informal sector.

• Reduce the stigmatization surrounding refugees and asylum seekers.

• To have access to needs and social spaces for refugees and asylum seekers.

Our aim is to provide easy access to proper education with only a phone and free of charge. The coronavirus shows the potential of online teaching, however, the virus continuing to restrict face to face contact means that we cannot rely on social workers teaching in refugee camps or teaching to marginalised groups. 

We want to use education to empower refugees with the knowledge and skills to live fulfilling and independent lives.

We are working on our minimum viable product, parts of the app are currently being coded and shown to refugees and asylum seekers. Currently, we are also creating our curriculum working with refugee and asylum seeker NGOs as well as Amala education, they work with 150 educators and refugee learners to develop the first international high school curriculum. We have created our first draft course in French and English modeled after the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. With this, we are working with the experts from Amala and educators to provide a comprehensive and holistic curriculum.

We have recruited students at the college, a group of dedicated and talented individuals that will help create the app, from the curriculum to the interface.

Along with this, we have conducted surveys and interviews with refugees in Belgium and the UK to gauge the demands and needs of our target users.

There is currently no app that exists to purely assist refugees and asylum seekers. AILEM is unlike anything on the market. The process of each chapter would be 1. Acquisition 2. Review/Retain 3. Application. Each process we want to tackle in an innovative method.

ACQUISITION & RETAIN: One downfall we felt with conventional apps is that it is not sufficient enough to learn a language from scratch and the content is not very applicable to conversing in the language from day 1. With this, we want to find a more innovative course delivery that mimic a real-life classroom experience, this includes optional homework tasks, video lectures, and dual coding (combination of visual and words).

Additionally, our word-bank features teach vocabulary that is useful for refugees and asylum seeker's context setting; Users can choose words that are meaningful and contextual from our vocabulary list, which creates their personalized workbank. They are tested with these words and used in homework activities.

AI can change our education and eliminate the reliance on external tutoring centers or NGOs. One feature we want to initially focus on is AI pronunciation coaching in order to improve pronunciation.

APPLICATION: Firstly we have meeting spaces, where students are matched up with other students or teachers through video chats; Along with this we also want to recreate conversations and scenarios that refugees may face in their life. Simple immersive technology like short clips with options to choose responses could replicate conversations without having to invest heavily in AR/VR technology.

Currently, we are in direct contact with a minimum of 20 refugees based in the UK and Belgium. This formed our preliminary panel to provide feedback for our beta app. As we launch our app in Brussel, we are doing an in personal marketing campaign to visit the refugee camps and centers in the city. We are expecting all the refugees and asylum seekers based in Belgium specifically to start the life-changing experience and pass it on to their peers for the sake of shared benefit. The count of refugees in Belgium is approximately 61,662 according to the statistics for 2019.

In the future, namely in one year, our app is planned to outreach tens of communities of refugees and asylum seekers in the Belgium and the UK together, impacting the whopping population of 194,756.

In the span of 5 years, with a resound ing achievement indebted to the worldwide recognition of the app among refugees around the globe, we will be able to lead an unparalleled social impact on a wide variety of refugees in many different countries starting from Europe and the US. Our plan at this point in time will have targeted an optimistic number of 20 million refugees.

As we touch upon various SDG goals, this provides us many indicators to measure our change and impact. To measure success, we have several key performance indicators that will allow us to measure our progress and guide us to grow our app. Our first indicator is to track the number of users for the app, along with the geography, this means that to show if we need to continue our marketing campaign. Another way to measure success is tracking the progress of the users, and those who dropped out or did not continue would determine if there is an issue with the course or point to areas of improvement.

In tackling the social challenges of refugees and asylum seekers, we want to increase the enrollment rate of schooling and decrease the unemployment rate among refugees. 

We are currently working with students of UWC AC, where the project was found and where we have easy access to volunteers and human capital without spending money. Currently, the core team consists of 4 committed students, 2 artists and 6 volunteers working on the curriculum and coding the app.

The early hardships in living in Belgium heavily inspired Abo to pursue the app, he also volunteered in refugee camps in Belgium. Abo’s other passion is coding, in the summer of 2020, Abo coded a website from scratch that teaches theoretical physics for beginners. Abo has lots of personal connections and contacts to refugees in Belgium being a refugee himself but also volunteered in local groups that support refugees. He also knows 8 languages, very useful for translating and communicating with refugees.

The other co-founder, Xinyao is an active member in the co-curricular STAR, teaching english to refugees and asylum seekers in Cardiff, an inspiration for the project. In her experience, she learned that they heavily relied on refugee centres, where they were able to get food, practice conversing in English and more. Xinyao also worked on many startup projects such as executive director for 24 Hour Race or the Certified Immune app.

Zakarya is our translator for the application and researcher, he was part of an SDGs (sustainable development goals) action campaign in his country and he is an intermediate python computer programmer. Begin a refugee himself, he also has many connections and experiences to build the app best suited to our target users.

Lucia is our in-house artist, she was chosen from her valuable experience from the role as the creative director 24 Hour Race and her graphic design endevours. She is a IB Higher Level Visual Arts students with her speciality in creative digital drawings and designs.

To uphold our ethos of an app created by refugees for refugees, not only include our refugee and asylum seeker panel but also ingrained into our inclusive team. Currently our core team is a mix of refugee and non-refugee students, along with diverse nationalities. We recognize the benefits of an inclusive and diverse nature of our leadership team. It will allow us to explore different talents or ideas of different learning methods for a holistic solution.

As an organization, we strive to recruit people from different walks of backgrounds, fostering a business culture that is equitable, diverse and inclusive. This is heavily inspired by our UWC mission of the Atlantic College "UWC makes education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future." Our curriculum team involves students with different nationalities, more importantly they are all chosen with their different background experiences. Some members have volunteering experience teaching migrant children in Spain to primary school children in Japan.

We believe that being part of the Solve community will unlock new and valuable connections, these connection will undoubtedly provide the adequate expertise to guide our student team to create a sophisticated and effective product, for example, artificial intelligence experts. It would be tremendously inspirational to hear about the success from other projects of similar fields. This is a key part of addressing the need of securing partnerships as mentioned previously.

The Solve membership will also crucially help us with our funding issues, not only with the initial $10,000 pounds but also by providing us a platform to attract future investors. The exposure will also allow the app to gain more reach and helping more refugees and asylum seekers.

Since a big part of our revenue would come from application to grant schemes and pitching to investors. We would definitely require help and expertise in order to improve our pitching skills and maximize funding. This can ensure our project is financially sustainable in the long term.

Along with this, we hope that by being part of the SOLVE community we can gain exposure and recognition to expand our outreach to help our target user.

Additionally, the Solve's connection to MIT could provide us AI experts for our AI integration in our app, also finding talented individual for our team. Similarly, as students we lack the experience of the legal side of starting a non-profit organisation, we are looking for help and advice of setting up the organisation from experts.

Some organizations that we would like to have a meaningful and advantageous partnership with include the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), The Online Learning Consortium (OLC) and MIT artificial intelligence. Each of these organizations would help us (respectively): Reach out to more refugees and asylum seekers who are in need of a widely accessible and non-rivalrous service, improve the quality of the built-in curriculum and enhance the service outcomes to the users from creating easy-to-use to interactive learning features, and integrate and grow the AI aspect to our app in order for the user to enjoy a more individualized and sophisticated experience while receiving a quality education.

Our main goal is to help empower refugees and asylum seekers worldwide, especially in areas where marginalisation and religious extremism are pressing concerns. We believe that prevention is always the best measure rather than dealing with the outcome. With this grant, we can use education as a tool to help incoming refugees and asylum seekers to be able to integrate into society and mitigate the risk of marginalisation and other social issues.

This large prize money means we can greater improve our team but also pursue the ambitious project of our AILEM academy starting in Belgium. With a large number of dedicated users, we want to ultimately establish an academy that supports talented and promising refugees and asylum seekers to have greater access to education and help employment. Invest in the talent of the future.  

When perusing this project, our team sensed a gap where Artificial intelligence is used to assist underprivileged groups. We aim that our AI solutions such as the pronunciation coach, grammar checker or object identifier can help provide a digital and equitable classroom for those who may not be able to access proper education. This technology can also provide a more personalized experience for the target users. The pronunciation coach for example helps the refugee or asylum seekers develop confidence in speaking and expressing themselves in a foreign country, a progressive step in the fight against social marginalization.

With the grant and potential connections with SOLVE, we looking towards hiring and recruiting AI experts to help us bring our ideas to reality. We want to invest heavily in this area to create a sophisticated product as a core part of our app. Moreover we will use AI in "object recognition", "text recognition", "text to speech and speech to text" in order to enhance learning abilities in our solution.

When perusing this project, our team sensed a gap where Artificial intelligence is used to assist underprivileged groups. We aim that our AI solutions such as the pronunciation coach, grammar checker or object identifier can help provide a digital and equitable classroom for those who may not be able to access proper education. This technology can also provide a more personalized experience for the target users. The pronunciation coach for example helps the refugee or asylum seekers develop confidence in speaking and expressing themselves in a foreign country, a progressive step in the fight against social marginalization.