TOOLS FOR FEMALE REFUGUEES JOBS

Our solution will tackle the need to support refugee girls and women around the world that have unequal access to quality education. Our solution is human-centered, tech-based and innovative in the use of digital content, MOOC and an App to reach the target population. We use learning tools to increase English Language skills, digital literacy and entrepreneurship tools, aiming to be useful for refugees women and girls. Refugees women and girls have more access to smartphones than to desktop computers, so we'll be able to use new technology and in a near future 5G technology to reach our targeted population.

We intend to use the money to scale up our solution testing in Portugal, Greece and Turkey and to scale up our solution use through marketing investment to reach our target population.

Women and girls have less opportunities than men in the biggest part of the world. Vulnerable women and girls are in a disadvantageous position, mainly due to economics constraints, religious beliefs and cultural differences often. This inequality in opportunities prevents girls to become empowered women and creates the background for women to be fully dependent from their father, brother or husband. Women and girls make up nearly half of the 258 million people worldwide who have crossed international borders to escape danger or pursue opportunity. Amidst unprecedented levels of forced displacement, about half of refugees, too, are women and girls. Therefore, refugee’s women and girls are particularly vulnerable and need much additional support to prevent all kind of discrimination and abuse. Individual realization and empowerment for taking in her own hands future and destiny is driven by education, learning opportunities and skills obtention in order to be more likely to get a job. Future income, revenues and personal sustainability depends mainly from having a job, so to avoid women dependence and subjugation is anchored in job requirements fulfilling. Therefore, our goal is to solve this problem through improvement of skills, competences and knowledge, contributing for employability of women and girls. 

Once digital tools and English language skills are crucial for job opportunities. English language as common global working tool increases possibilities of succeeding when applying for jobs.

Our main objectives are focused to develop a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC), with free of charge access and certificated by Lusofona University, innovating in interaction with young females through videos and new didactic resources and pedagogical approach.  Language was found to be a key influence on almost every policy area, and the level of language tuition was widely stated to be too low for practical use. Vocational language tuition was found to be useful in addition to combined work/language opportunities. 

Language teaching methodology is very innovative and based on the storytelling approach and real life language approach, and functional grammar.

So, we’ll disclose the MOOC in an App (hosted at Lusofona-X), with several functionalities, allowing direct communication between users and project headquarters, inquiries, job vacancies information selected with geolocation, important notices for refugees, event and debates, preparation for job interviews, CV writing, how to seek for a job, etc.

Our target population is composed by refugee's young women and girls. We’ll test this model in Portugal, Greece and Turkey, working directly with women and refugee girls, in a pilot to measure quantitative and qualitative impacts of our methodology, in order to achieve a second stage that can be scaled up at worldwide level.

Future income, revenues and personal sustainability depends mainly from having a job, so the best way to avoid women dependence and subjugation is anchored in job requirements fulfilling. Therefore, our goal is to solve this problem through improvement of skills, competences and knowledge, contributing for employability of women and girls. 

Identifying education as a major tool for equality and to reduce gender discrimination, we bet on this population empowerment in order to get more jobs to stimulate their autonomy and independence, promoting gender equity, contributing to reduce economic asymmetries between genders.

We are already working with this population, women and girls refugees that came to Portugal and are now living here and benefit from our Technical Assistance to local communities that host those women and girls.

We defined this solution after a need survey done in direct work with this target population and per their suggestion. 

Our solution is focused in the need to support refugee girls and women around the world that have unequal access to quality education. With more education, they'll improve their employability skills, get better jobs and earn higher wages, so they become less susceptible to infectious diseases, have lower maternal and newborn mortality rates, are less likely to marry as children or against their will and will be more productive. Our solution is human-centered, tech-based and innovative using digital content, MOOC and an App to reach the target population, offering the English language skills, digital literacy and entrepreneurship tools. 

Our solution is innovative in the use of digital content, MOOC and an App to reach the target population. Refugees women and girls have more access to smartphones than to desktop computers, so we'll be able to use new technology and in a near future 5G technology to reach our targeted population.

Our solution competitor is the App R.E.P. - Refugee Empowerment Program that is not targeted only for women and girls, nor is free access to everyone, being mandatory to be registered to use it and we have more digital tools and more interactive content and the ability to have permanent communication with our targeted population.

Lusofona X is a trusted platform for education and learning. Founded by Lusofona University, Lusofona X is transforming traditional education, removing the barriers of cost, location and access. Fulfilling the demand for people to learn on their own terms. Our students come from every country in the world, even though Portuguese Speaking Countries contribute with the majority of our students. 

Lusofona X is an open-source platform that powers Lusofona University online courses and is freely available.

The Lusofona X App will include access to the MOOC and also all digital content targeting refugees women and girls.

We use Lusofona X platform that is similar to EdX platform and works in e-learning environment and uses technology to promote courses and information dissemination. 

We'll use the new App from Lusofona X to direct our efforts to refugees women and girls.

We use learning tools to increase English Language skills, digital literacy and entrepreneurship tools, aiming to be useful for refugees women and girls, whose are some of the most vulnerable women and girls in this world, so they can improve their employability and through their capacity to get a job increase their income which will contribute for them to have more autonomy, reduce dependence from men in their lives and to have a voice in society. The impact from our solution shall produce results in the short term with more working refugees women and girls, but also in the long run with the improvement of women and girls situation. 

Currently, we are now working with 50 refugees women and girls. 

In one year, we intend to reach at least one thousand refugees women and girls, within our testing stage in Portugal and in Greece and Turkey.

In five years we intend to reach at least ten million refugees women and girls, meaning that we would be able to scale up our solution use at worldwide level.

For the next year we intend to test our solution in Portugal, Greece and Turkey and try to disseminate use of our solution as much as we can.

Our work in next five years will be to scale up our solution use at worldwide level with refugees women and girls and impacting positively millions of lives, reaching ten million refugees women and girls if possible.

We have two barriers at this moment.

1. At the financial side we must fund 500 000 USD in order to be able to reach our targeted population, investing in marketing and dissemination raising awareness of our solution among refugees women and girls.

2. Marketing investment and approach will be needed to reach our targeted population.

We are focused to overcome these barriers using the following approach:

1. We are applying for all financial sources that would be able to fund the needed budget amount. 

2. We are looking for additional partners that can help us to disseminate our solution use and introduce us in other countries communities of refugees.

We work within Lusofona Group that includes Lusofona University and several universities and higher education institutes in Portuguese Speaking Countries. 

Our core team working in the solution is composed of 7 persons that are full-time staff and around 12 other workers that work in the technical part. We also have several volunteers from our university and from our partners on the ground that have been collaborating in the focus groups created to develop the solution and giving important insights for solution development and to focus on needs and tackle these needs of refugees women and girls.

We are particularly well positioned to deliver this solution because we have been working in this for more than 12 years, in offline environment and in the last year we started developing the solution for online, so we can scale up this model and solution at world level.

We are partnering with NGOs from Greece and Turkey, specialized in support for refugees, working with women and girls and with focus in education. This entities are Active Citizens Partnership from Greece and DeM Turkey and RSC - Refugees Support Centre from Turkey. We also work in Technical Assistance to refugee hosts in Portugal, namely Islamic communities, like CIL - Islamic Community of Lisbon, AMCI - Islamic Community of Amadora and ACITMMM - Islamic Community of Tapada das Mercês/Sintra. 

These partnerships give us all needed tools to apply our solution directly with our targeted population in Portugal, Greece and Turkey. 

COFAC is responsible for the management of Lusófona University, recognised by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education in 1998, and is the largest private university in Portugal, integrating 10 HEI in Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.

It has a student body of more than 10.000 students and 1500 teachers and it is structured around 9 Schools that constitute the main institutional unit and offer 44 undergraduate Degrees, 45 Master Degrees, 11 PhD’s programs and 42 Post- graduation courses. Besides this, the university offers a large number of vocational and continuous training courses accordingly with the life-learning development paradigm. 

Lusofona University has huge experience in applied research, literature revision, best practices identification, monitoring and evaluation, providing insights on skills and knowledge of women empowerment, education for women and girls and for the most vulnerable in general. We work with local communities, associations, Christian, Islamic and other religious communities in an ecumenic approach, focused in the most vulnerable, migrants and refugees. Our approach is based in multicultural, multiethnic and religious inter-dialogue, educating youngsters in democratic values, Human Rights and Open Society importance, contributing to create individuals that are proactive activists, doing volunteer work for social causes and standing for more inclusive societies.

Our business model and sustainability in the university and all our departments come from tuition fees and services provided to the society and companies.

Mainly we assure our sustainability through tuition fees that cover all university expenses and pay for departments doing social work and giving Technical Assistance to local communities, associations and supporting vulnerable women and girls and refugees. So, we have achieved balance between revenue and expenses to support all activities and social work in the long run and to support solution development. We would like to get your support to be able to conduct further tests for our solution, not only in Portugal, but also in Greece and Turkey and to invest in the next stage of solution development to scale up and disseminate solution use at worldwide level.

We are trying to find financial sources for our budget to test and scale up our solution.

We also need to get support to disseminate our solution use and to reach our targeted population in several countries.

We are trying to find financial sources for our budget to test and scale up our solution. We have a budget amounting to 500 000 USD to be able to achieve our solution dissemination at worldwide level within refugees women and girls.

We also need to get support to disseminate our solution use and to reach our targeted population in several countries. We need to get additional marketing tools, so we can reach our targeted population and fulfill our mission.

For next stage we intend to partner with organizations that are used to work with us for longtime, like Active Citizens Partnership a NGO from Greece and DeM and RSC - Refugee Support Centre from Turkey and Portuguese organizations hosting refugees.

To be able to disseminate our solution use at worldwide level we'll need to get new partners that work with refugees in other countries. Maybe in SOLVE Members or network we can find additional partners to scale up our solution use.

All in our solution is focused to promote refugee girls and women economic and financial inclusion, through the tools and skills improvement, namely in digital literacy, English language skills and entrepreneurship tools.

We'll use the prize to invest in marketing campaigns to reach our targeted population. We'll start testing our solution in Portugal, Greece and Turkey and we intend to disseminate our solution use at worldwide scale in a next step.

Our solution is technology based, through the use of an App and Lusofona X platform and Massive Online Open Course promotion aiming to promote more employability conditions for refugee women and girls. Once we found that women and girls voices in society depend on their capacity to be independent, financially autonomous and this results mainly from their ability to get new jobs or to start a new business of their own. We'll use this prize to disseminate our solution use within refugees women and girls, starting by a test in Portugal, Greece and Turkey, to scale up the solution worldwide in a next step.

Our solution is based in an educational platform (Lusofona X) and an App to disclose the MOOC to teach English Language and to promote digital literacy and entrepreneurship. Once we'll focus women and girls, specially refugees ones that are definitively within the most vulnerable groups of women in girls worldwide, we believe to be eligible for the GM prize. 

We intend to use the money to scale up our solution testing in Portugal, Greece and Turkey and to scale up our solution use through marketing investment to reach our target population.

Once our solution is based in learning tools for women and girls and focused to give English Language tools for employability, and in digital literacy and entrepreneurship tools, aiming to be used mainly by refugees women and girls, we believe to be eligible for the Gulbenkian Award for Adult Literacy.

Regarding a future pilot in Portugal, we'll be not only doing so, but as Portuguese institution, headquartered in Lisbon, we are already working on the ground supporting local communities and working directly with refugees that made suggestions and gave very useful insights for our solution. Furthermore, we'll conduct the pilot and solution testing in Portugal, aiming to do so also in Greece and Turkey.

Finally, we want to state that we'll be also open and interested to cooperate with other solution promoters in order to help developing the local tests and pilots in Portugal.