AILEM

AILEM seeks to provide knowledge and education tailored for the needs of refugees and asylum seekers to integrate into society.

According to the UNHCR, at least 89.3 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Upon arrival, refugees and asylum seekers face the direct challenge of language barrier. The government's use of the conventional "one-size-fits-all" approach has shown not to be tailored and slow to respond to the needs and situation of refugees and asylum seekers. The inability to express oneself means individuals can not access basic services, opportunities, resources, employment, healthcare and more, in general creating more challenges to rebuild a new life.

Additionally, language is the basic element of the local culture, on a deeper level the need to learn the language is further driven by the need to integrate in the society. Refugees and asylum seekers have the right to a sense of belonging and acceptance in their new community. Refugees and asylum seekers face social exclusion, barred from equal opportunities and acceptance from the local community. 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.

As said by one of our refugee members “Language is the key to life”. Language is used in our daily life from making new friends and expressing pain at the hospital to finding employment and understanding local culture. Language is longevity.

AILEM is an app that aims to provide language education for refugees and asylum seekers to help integrate in a foreign country. Currently our app is available on google play store and apple app store, with more than 7000 downloads. Our ethos is “Created by refugees for the refugees” We work to create solutions that are tailored to the experiences and challenges of refugees and asylum seekers. Using language to break down intercultural misunderstandings/gaps amongst refugees and their new host country. Throughout the app creation journey, every design, feature, and solution is consulted with our refugee and asylum seeker community, ensuring that we have a solution that is tailored to the journey and experiences. The refugees drive the content and the team aims to bring their ideas and suggestions into reality, we don’t see this model in other language app solutions.

AILEMmap: Allows users to easily access a summary of phrases that can be used in any situation, quick access and available without internet. 

AILEM Curriculum: Learn through reading stories that revolve around common conversations from introductions to ordering food at a restaurant. 

AILEM Exchange: Connect with other students, teachers and users who are learning similar languages, allowing you to ask questions or share knowledge with each other.

AILEM Games: Challenge other users online with language games to practise grammar and vocabulary.

Our app has been recognised on the international level with honours and awards such as:

• UWC Lighthouse Prize 2021

• MIT SOLV[ED] Youth Innovation Prize 2021 Top 20 Shortlist

• Universitas 21 RISE Provost Award 2021

• UWC GoMakeADifference Grant Recipient 2022

• World Summit Awards Young Innovators Awards 2022

• World Summit Awards European Young Innovators Awards 2022

We currently work closely with refugees in Wales, UK and the EU. We started in Brussels, Belgium because initially our app was inspired from the experiences of one of our co-founders, Abobakar, who is an Afghan refugee living in Brussels. Arriving in a new foreign country, he was frustrated with the lack of support for learning French and eventually feeling extremely isolated. Thus, with our deep connection to the refugee community in Brussels, that was the starting point of the project. We also started in Wales with our student hub at UWC Atlantic College. The school has had a long connection between the refugee centre in Cardiff for many years. According to the Welsh Refugee Council in Cardiff alone, there are just over 10,000 refugees. 

Besides language learning, the app also connects refugees to local communities through our exchange platform, as well as games to appeal to youngsters (majorities of refugees are youngsters).

We have two long term goal in these regions (1) help elevate the overall level including speaking, listening, reading and writing, ultimately empowering them from being self-sufficient from self-expression; (2) Increase the intercultural understanding between people in the community by our exchange platform and allow refugees to be easily integrated in the society. The model can be easily scaled up to any region that refugees and asylum seekers have the need.

The early hardships in living in Belgium heavily inspired Abobakar to pursue the app, he also volunteered in refugee camps in Belgium. Abobakar’s other passion is coding, in the summer of 2020, Abobakar coded a website from scratch that teaches theoretical physics for beginners. Recently, Abobakar was one of the European Commission Peace Scholars for the 2022 One Young World Conference. He was also the finalist in the UNESCO Digital Games of Peace Program in recognition with his achievements in app development. Abobakar 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 Wales or the Certified Immune app.

Muhammad Sagar Ali, the head of marketing for AILEM app, has extensive experience in managing international projects, participating in debate competitions, and holding leadership roles have prepared me to effectively deliver this solution. His experiences include participating in STEM projects such as GreenPower Education Trust Challenge, REV robotics and Erasmus+ programmes. Additionally, his participation in the ESU Schools Mace debate competitions and selection for the ESU House of Lords have solidified his ability to articulate and market effectively. 

Besides our core team,  we have a large dedicated student volunteering community that represents 36+ countries and all share a like-minded passion for this project. This community provides us with a wide range of perspectives and ideas, which allows us to approach the problem from multiple angles and ensure that our solution is comprehensive and inclusive. We have made a conscious effort to uphold our ethos of an app created by refugees for refugees by including our refugee and asylum seeker panel in our team. This panel provides us with firsthand knowledge and insight into the needs and challenges faced by refugees, which is invaluable in ensuring that our solution is tailored to meet their specific needs. Our team comprises a mix of refugee and non-refugee students, along with diverse nationalities. This diversity allows us to bring different perspectives, skills, and experiences to the table, which enables us to explore different talents and ideas of different learning methods for a holistic solution. We recognize the benefits of an inclusive and diverse nature of our leadership team. By having a diverse leadership team, we are able to tap into a broad range of talents and perspectives to achieve a comprehensive solution that addresses the needs of all refugees regardless of their backgrounds.

Interviews - We have conducted surveys and interviews with refugees and asylum seekers scattered in Europe, including Germany and Belgium. Some of the connections were through Abobakar’s (co-founder) refugee community, many of them were also through posting surveys in large social media platforms. The goal of the interviews is to learn the largest challenges faced when moving to a new country. Many insights we gained were difficulties in pronunciation, learning important phrases to access services in specific situations and lack of teaching support and intercultural understanding in general. 

Presentations - The AILEM team has given online and in person presentations with the group “Student Action for Refugees” in Cardiff, Red Cross Belgium’s headquarters in Liege and more. As well conducted online user testing on maze and a global app debugging competition, all to collect feedback to improve the app. 

Our panel and refugee coordinators - Finally, in order to embody our ethos of the app “created by refugees for refugees”. All the content and features in the app from curriculum to coding is shown to our refugee and asylum seeker panel, along with language teachers to correct the errors. The panel helps us avoid the risks of writing a curriculum that is irrelevant for our users. During summer of 2022, we launched our refugee coordinator system where we work with refugee leaders residing in major cities in refugee camps or communities. They serve as the “eyes and ears” of the current local refugee situations. We have regular calls with the refugees who update us on the users in their community with feedback, suggestions, improvements or if they are in need of any resources.

We chose to use mobile phones, as it breaks down the time, mobility and economical barriers that refugees face that causes them to not be able to access in person language lessons, but instead can follow the AILEM content at their own pace. 

The impact from our theory of change:

Key activities

• 50+ short stories in the French and English curriculum
• Posts on the AILEM exchange platform
• Message other teachers and students to practice conversations
• 500+ questions to practice on AILEM games platform

Outcomes

• Improving confidence in conversing in the foreign language.
• Increased access to basic necessities, employment opportunities, etc.
• Measuring outcome - We are looking to implement a data collection system to assess two indexes. We look to assess language confidence from the data of the games platform. We also have another survey to assess a refugee’s integration score to compare over time. 

Impact

• Breakdown the language, cultural and social barriers that are present in the host country.
• Support the general integration journey of refugees and asylum seekers.
• As said by one of our refugee members “Language is the key to life”. Language is used in our daily life from making new friends and expressing pain at the hospital to finding employment and understanding local culture. Language is longevity.

We are setting up an in-house index that assesses refugee learners’ language confidence and integration score progression, using game data and user survey. 

1. Language confidence 

Our app is able to collect real time data of the amount of language posts, stories read, questions correctly answered, etc. This is made possible with our new feature, AILEM games, where users can battle online users in language games and quizzes to practise their abilities. The data can track user’s improvements in the language with their accuracy of the answers and difficulties of the games.

2. Integration score

Through our refugee coordinator systems, we want to send our surveys to measure baselines in communities from refugee coordinators and then compare over time using the same survey. We will start with using an external platform to conduct surveys such as google forms, but in the future we want to code this in the app. As there are no standardised systems to assess an individual's integration, we have created a unique system to measure and also provide suggestions to help. We will continue to fine tune and partner with anthropological experts from universities to create a useful tool for policy makers. Through our survey that assesses the refugee’s social situation, cultural knowledge and more, the refugee will receive a score. The lower the score the lower the refugee is integrated in society and vice versa, the score will dictate what archetypal character they are - Newcomer, wanderer, seeker and hero. Depending on what character, the app will provide advice in the form of a feature of the app to explore and improve their situation.

The main technology is our educational app coded with flutter with Android studio and php and mysql for the backend, now it is available on google play store and iOS. We rent servers with external partners to host the app platform.

Moreover we use Google’s deepMind in order to generate the audio in our with the best text to speech engine out there. It allows our users to learn and hear a language with close to human pronunciation.

Our app is currently downloaded more than 7000 times. This is one year since our launch last year. Next year, we are hoping to reach 30,000 downloads with at least 1000 monthly active users.

Market barriers can pose a challenge in a competitive market such as language learning apps. Along with the added challenge of convincing a group to adopt a new app and use it consistently. There is also the physical barrier that all refugees may not have access to phones, but a study conducted in 2016 by the UNHCR stated that more than 70% of refugee households have phones - undoubtedly the value will have increased during these few years and in the future. In an UNHCR blog, refugees already use smartphones and social media platforms mainly – communication, information and navigation, all of which our app are actively addressing.

The content may take long to develop when we expand to other regions with different languages and customs. Writing up new content and translation requires a lot of manpower and a large dedicated group to overcome. 

As we do not have 1 consistent stream of revenue such as a defined consumer, one identified challenge is ensuring that we will have enough donations and grants to be able to cover our costs especially when we start to expand and costs increase.

Belgium Red Cross - who has helped us market the app to local refugees and connect us with refugee translators who have joined the team.

Refugee Council UK - the organisation are in full support of the app and we are looking to implement the app in their refugee organisation of 12,000 refugees per year

Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi, Africa - we are implementing a new Swahili version of our English curriculum and games with the refugee camp population of 60,000 people who are in desperate need of English education.

Home Academy Bangladesh - we are partnering together to provide programming classes for refugees for upskilling purposes but also in the future become permanent programmers for AILEM, in line with our ethos “created by refugees, for refugees”.

United World Colleges - Our student team at the UWC Atlantic College works closely with language teachers to create an approved high quality language course for our target users. 

Amala Education - In the early stages, they have helped us connect with refugees in Jordan for the remote testing program. 

The app can be easily scaled up to any region that refugees and asylum seekers have the need, especially as the app is accessible worldwide. To reach the full accessibility to refugees and asylum seeker, our app is free and we seek revenue from other sources: 

1. Ad revenue from the app platform

2. Grant scheme

3. AILEM Classroom

4. Donation scheme

Value proposition

What makes us unique is our ethos created by refugees, for refugees. Our services are tailored to the needs of our target demographic, which makes the app highly attracted to refugee communities that we work closely with. We also invited refugees to write stories, create content that encourages more interaction and control with our app on a level that is not seen in other apps.

Language is intertwined with the lives of refugees and asylum seekers everyday, from basics to complex needs. Free language education that is tailored to their experiences can support their integration into a new country. The app also benefits the wider society as language can bring individuals together for a more safe and inclusive region for all.

Go to Market 

Refugee coordination system - We have refugee coordinators that are located in different regional areas from US, Netherlands to Belgium, they help us conduct presentations and visits in camps and centres. We take advantage of word of mouth strategies within refugee communities to share about the app which is highly effective and low cost. We also look to partner with NGOs to spread the word about our solution.

Social medial app - We also promote the app by sharing on online pages, groups or directly through meta advertisements for facebook and instagram.

We are working on two systems to reach financial sustainability and continue to provide free language services for refugees and asylum seekers:

AILEM classroom - Currently underdevelopment, the web platform is subscription services for NGOs and refugee centres to keep track of the language progress of the refugees under their institutions. This would allow us to pivot to a Business to Business to Consumer model, and thus we would not charge refugees and asylum seekers for education.

Donation scheme - We are looking to implement a donation scheme where donors can join as “friends of Habibi” (Habibi as the mascot of our app. This would be similar to other tier donation schemes where donors can donate on a monthly basis from 1 pound to 50 pounds. Depending on the amount, we would have different perks for the donors from name recognition or being featured in the app as a special character in the stories.