The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-led Media Lab launches The Refugee Learning Accelerator. It focuses on the needs of the thousands displaced students who are at risk of losing access to education because of the ongoing refugee crisis in Syria and the Middle East.
The accelerator plans a six-month program starting from October 2017 in Amman, Jordan. It would gather the innovative minds of the engineering and tech community in the Middle East to work on solutions to improve the lives of the young refugee students. The initiative aims to find and support ideas that would help refugees keep learning either in a traditional classroom environment or informally. In addition to that, the end-user of the solution could not be the student only but also their parents or teachers.
Genevieve Barrons, the Project Lead of the Refugee Learning Accelerator, MIT Media Lab explained that the good education needed to be locally centered – the language of the instruction, the content or the curriculum should be locally contextualized. Barrons also pointed out that the program was not looking for innovators who are seeking support to establish the next multimillion dollar company. Rather than that, she was searching for fresh minds willing to solve the problem with displaced youth with no access to education.
The accelerator program will be divided into several phases – apply, ideate, prototype, and incubate, said Barrons. The teams presenting the most promising ideas will attend workshops and training to ideate a solution. At a later stage, several shortlisted teams would proceed to the prototype stage. At the end, the teams with the best prototypes would receive either funding or network connections to help them grow.
The candidates must possess a working knowledge of Arabic and English. They need to apply in a group of 2-5 people. A degree in engineering is not required. The deadline for application is September 20th.