Include2020

The Problem: Non-English-speaking parents of primary school-aged children with developmental disabilities in low-resource settings struggle to access culturally relevant training and support resources to support their children's education at home.

The Solution: The Include2020 mobile application trains parents in culturally relevant inclusive education and developmental disability support strategies through evidence-based content developed by inclusive educators from the parents' cultural context. The application places users in one of four tracks based on their activation levels using a validated measure and provides culturally specific training content that helps parents support their children in foundational skills, academic skills, skills for independent living, and enrichment.

Scaling Potential: If scaled globally, Include2020 would help millions of the 93 million children with developmental disabilities access an education that supports their development and success at home and in the classroom. The platform is designed to be easily customized with culturally specific content from trained inclusive educators.

Of the 93 million children with developmental disabilities worldwide, more than 74 million live in low-income countries. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic many children with developmental disabilities struggled to access an education that supported their development due to discrimination, stigma and a lack of teacher training. Across the world, the pandemic exacerbated educational inequalities as virtual learning programs implemented during social distancing were not accessible to many children with disabilities. Parents also reported that they lacked the resources to support their children's development of academic and social skills. In an A Global Voice for Autism survey of refugee families with children with developmental disabilities, 30% of surveyed families identified help supporting their children's education as their top need during the pandemic and 100% reported this among their top three needs, despite high rates of food insecurity (41%) and domestic violence (39%) and other challenges experienced by the surveyed population. 

When families seek out resources to help them suppor their children at home, they find English-language resources designed for western contexts that are often not culturally relevant. Parents need relevant and accessible solutions to help their children learn, whether or not the child has access to a classroom learning experience.

Our solution is a mobile application with offline-accessible videos that trains parents of primary school aged children with developmental disabilities in culturally relevant practices for supporting their children's development and success in foundational skills, academic skills, skills for independence and enrichment. The application uses a validated measure to assess parents' activiation levels and places them in one of four tracks based on their activation level to position them for success. Parents then have access to videos in each of the four categories. They take pre and post quizzes on each video to measure baseline understanding and knowledge retention. 

To account for the substantial portion of our target population (46% according to an A Global Voice for Autism survey) that has access to internet once per week or less, users can download videos into the application for offline viewing and take the quizzes the next time they access the internet. 

We recognize that community support is vital to parents' engagement and success and parents can engage in private peer communities on social media platforms available to app users where they can discuss their successes and challenges and provide each other with feedback and encouragement. 

Our solution targets parents of primary school aged children with developmental disabilities, with a particular focus on families living in limited resource contexts. 80% of the 93 million children with developmental disabilities worldwide live in low-income countries and are often excluded from public school systems due to stigma and a lack of teacher training. Even when these children are able to access schools, the education they receive often fails to meet their learning needs. Research shows that parent support at home is key to the success of children with developmental disabilities in the classroom and our solution equips these parents to support their children by supplementing their classroom-based education with evidence-based learning support strategies at home.

The initial version of our solution targets Arabic-speaking communities, with a particular focus on Syrian and Palestinian refugee populations. To understand our users' needs, we conducted a survey of over 1,200 Arabic-speaking families in Turkey, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories. We also hired Syrian content creators living in Turkey to develop culturally relevant content relevant in low resource settings. Interest in the solution has already been expressed by potential users in Spanish, Somali and French-speaking communities and as we scale, we will tailor the content within the Include2020 interface and approach to specifically address the cultural needs of each community by onboarding local inclusive educators to produce the content. Every time we develop content, we test it among users in the target community to ensure relevance before adding it to the application and application users can easily request content if there is an area in which their needs are not being met.

Our solution aligns with the challenge by equipping parents to support their children with developmental disabilities at home in order to ensure that students whose educational needs are not met by a virtual learning approach have the support they need to succeed academically and socially. By equipping parents culturally relevant skills and strategies to teach their children, parents' ability to supplement classroom based education and support their children's success is improved.

Our team developed the initial version of our mobile application for Arabic-speaking communities and is now testing the product in the Arabic-speaking communities served by A Global Voice for Autism (in Jordan, the Palestinian Territories, Turkey and the United States). So far, we have had over 200 families test the mobile application content and provide feedback on their experiences and based on their feedback we are updating the application and will release the updated version for a second pilot. Our first pilot provided valuable feedback about improvements to the interface and navigability as well as ways to improve the evaluation of knowledge retention. We have implemented this feedback and are preparing to launch a second pilot, which is why we selected the pilot stage for our product.

Include2020 is the first inclusive education caregiver training mobile application designed to train families in low-resource contexts in culturally relevant practices. Rather than providing a one-size fits all solution, Include2020 is, at its core, a customizable interface that can be customized to meet the specific inclusive education training and support needs of communities around the world. Our solution provides an improved approach to the problem of parents' lack of knowledge on how best to support the education of their children with developmental disabilities by:

1) Offering an offline-accessible resource that is tailored for limited resource contexts. This allows families to benefit from the content without having to make financial sacrifices. 

2) Providing culturally appropriate training to families. We know that different cultures have different needs and that simply translating content into a local language is not enough to make it practical and relevant. We employ local content creators trained in inclusive education to develop the content that is right for their communities.

3) We build communities within our solution. Isolation is one of the greatest problems faced by parents of children with developmental disabilities, especially mothers, and especially in contexts where disability is stigmatized. The "Communities" section of our application offers pathways for parents to connect with others with similar experiences in their communities and around the world, and to exchange advice, experiences and encouragement. 

4) We are currently building an AI-powered component where parents can upload videos of themselves implementing learned skills (internet required) to receive instant feedback.

To date, we have tested our mobile application content with 2,600 individuals (1,500 parents supporting 1,100 children) both through the mobile application platform as well as through direct content tests. 

In the next year, we aim to reach 15,000 Arabic-speaking households (a parent and the children they support are counted as a single household within this goal) with the Arabic-language version of our mobile application.

In five years, we plan to have scaled our solution to support at least 10 additional languages/cultural contexts and plan to reach at least 15 million households with primary school-aged children with developmental disabilities worldwide.

Measurable indicators:

-Number of active users on our mobile application shows our reach and engagement with families (number of new active users per month allows us to track growth of that reach).

-Changes in performance between pre and post-quizzes on the mobile application demonstrates increases in applicable parent knowledge about how best to support their children.

-Parent reported progress through intake and interval surveys on our mobile application demonstrates learning, retention and application of learned content.

-Frequency of user engagement within community groups shows increased parent comfort discussing their children's needs and experiences and ownership of children's outcomes.

-Parent reported implementation of learned content within the mobile application shows that parents are taking what they learn and applying it within their natural environments.

-Parent feedback and video requests within the application tell us whether parents are getting what they need and what types of content we should add to become more effective, while also indicating parental interest in and engagement with the tool.

Our current solution team consists for 4 dedicated volunteers in the roles of project manager, translator/interpreter & community liaison, user experience designer and mobile application programmer, 5 contracted content creators and 2 contracted inclusive education professionals for a total of 11 team members, overseen by the non-profit's Board of Directors.

Our team is diverse in both background and experience. Our team members represent the United States, the Palestinian Territories, Syria and the Philippines and bring cultural knowledge, relationships and experiences from a wide variety of contexts. 

Our content creators are Syrian refugees living in Turkey and Jordan who are trained inclusive educators and they share common experiences with many within our initial target population of Arabic speaking refugee families. Our content creators have experience living in contexts with limited resources and have a deep knowledge of the cultural and resource contexts of the families we serve through our solution, which is evident in every piece of content they produce.

Our translator and community liaison is also from one of our target communities in the Palestinian Territories and brings more than 6 years' experience working with families in our target demographic in his local community and understands the barriers families face and how they vary from community to community within our target Arabic-speaking populations. He has rapport in his community as an advocate and supporter of children with developmental disabilities.

Our project manager has been working with families of children with developmental disabilities in refugee and conflict-affected communities since 2012 and has both a wide and deep understanding of these communities needs. 

Our UX designer is a former special education teacher who understands the needs of both children and families of children with developmental disabilities and can integrate her personal background with her market research to support the UX design process. 

As an inclusive education solution, inclusion is a top priority for the Include2020 team. It is important to us that our team represents the diversity and experiences of the people we serve and we make it a priority to keep our team diverse in terms of ability/disability, background, gender and refugee status. Our current team consists of 8 women and 3 men representing six countries, with four people with disclosed disabilities and 5 team members who are refugees. This team dynamic reflects our target market which is predominantly women (mothers) of children with developmental disabilities, some of whom have disabilities themselves and all of whom support people with disabilities, from multiple countries and many with refugee backgrounds.

Our team seeks partners that represent the communities we serve, is proactive about making accommodations to support and welcome team members with diverse needs, and address team members' professed support needs without requiring the disclosure of a particular identity, diagnosis or background to receive support. 

We want to become Solvers to gain access to the mentor, support and exposure that will allow us to make Include2020 a household name in the field of inclusive education for children with developmental disabilities. In order to successfully disseminate our solution, we need to build a global network of partnerships and stakeholders and believe that Solve's global network and high caliber of mentors will be invaluable in doing so.

 Additionally, we hope to join the Solve community to further develop our monitoring and evaluation practices so that we can collect additional data from our users to measure our impact, especially in the realm of child outcomes, without making the data collection experience punishing for users. We believe Solve can help us identify and streamline additional valuable data collection practices so that we can learn more about the users we serve and the ways we impact their lives without negatively impacting them in the information collection process.

Finally, we hope to connect with other like-minded peers who are dedicated to building a more inclusive world for all and who have creative solutions and life experiences that we can exchange to support one another and amplify the impacts of all of our solutions.

Financial-We are seeking support to identify grant opportunities and funders that can help us achieve widespread distribution to users as we continue to build our customer base as well as support in improving our accounting and financial practices so that we will be set up to scale rapidly from an administrative standpoint.

Public Relations & Product-We are interested in working with Solve on our global marketing strategy so that we are well positioned to continue expanding into communities around the world, and become a trusted household name for families of children with developmental disabilities in limited-resource settings. We are also interested in support and feedback on our strategy for reaching out to customers and growing our paid client base.

Monitoring and Evaluation-While we are currently tracking a variety of metrics, we are looking to increase our measurement of indirect beneficiary outcomes (children with developmental disabilities) without creating tedious/punishing data collection processes for our users.

Technology-We are interested in technological support as we pilot our next phase with the machine learning component and work out issues to ensure privacy and security of user data.

We would like to partner with MIT's Machine Learning Group to optimize our algorithm for the next phase of our mobile application.

We would also like to partner with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support the adaptation and dissemination of our mobile application to families in communities they serve. Along these same lines, we are interested in partnering with UNICEF to scale the dissemination of our mobile application.

Our Include2020 mobile application was specifically design with refugee communities in mind. We recognized that the financial exclusion of refugees often specifically prevents refugee families of children with developmental disabilities from accessing the education and support their children need to achieve independence and participate in their societies politically and economically in the future. Our Arabic-language application content is designed by refugee teachers for refugee families to ensure that refugee children with developmental disabilities can integrate into their classrooms and communities and that their families can access the support they need to help their children thrive despite financial, legal and geographic barriers as well as the challenges of migration. 

If awarded the Andan Prize for Innovation in Refugee Inclusion to advance our solution, the prize will allow us to disseminate our mobile application to 5,000 refugee families of children with developmental disabilities in Jordan, Turkey and the Palestinian Territories and to test the new machine learning component of our solution with an additional 2,000 families to collect feedback and make improvements so that we can integrate this component to provide feedback to all users of the mobile application by the end of 2022.

Our team will use the GM Prize to increase access to inclusive education support through the dissemination of our mobile application to refugee families that are legally, economically and politically marginalized in the countries in which they reside. Our application helps parents teach their children a variety of academic skills, including those in the STEM field and increases access to math and science education for children with developmental disabilities while opening up these career paths to children for whom they might not otherwise have been viewed as a possibility.

If awarded the prize, it would enable us to distribute our mobile application to 10,000 refugee families and families in low-resource settings in Jordan, Turkey and the Palestinian Territories and to test the new machine learning component of our solution with an additional 2,000 families to collect feedback and make improvements so that we can integrate this component to provide feedback to all users of the mobile application by the end of 2022.

In order to have communities that are truly safe, they need to be safe and inclusive of all learners and our technology both helps communities be more inclusive of their residents with developmental disabilities and helps residents with developmental disabilities develop more skills for independence so that they can live more safely and make greater contributions to their communities.

According to the Family Caregiver Alliance, more than 75% of primary caregivers of people with disabilities in the United States are women. This number is even greater among populations with more traditional divisions of labor (with the man working outside the home and the woman caring for children inside the home). In A Global Voice for Autism's programs between 2014-2018, 88% of participating parents were women. Many of these women experience isolation due to their significant caregiving responsibilities as well as community stigma that often limits their engagement with their communities. Our Include2020 mobile application is specifically targeted at these women. It helps them build community by connecting with other parents in similar situations, empowers them to take ownership over their children's learning outcomes through knowledge and skillbuilding, and helps make their lives easier by providing training in evidence-based practices to help their children develop their academic and social skills and increase their independence. 

With the Innovation for Women prize, our team would distribute our application to 7,500 mothers in Arabic-speaking refugee and low-resource communities so that they can use it to develop their skills for supporting their children, decrease their parenting stress by building confidence in their abilities and helping their children increase their independence, and can connect with others with similar experiences through the application's community platforms.

The next phase of our Include2020 mobile application leverages machine learning to provide parents of children with developmental disabilities in low-resource settings access to instant feedback as they implement newly learned practices with their children with developmental disabilities. This technology will increase the fidelity of implementation of parents' inclusive education and developmental disability support practices in their homes regardless of their abilities to pay for expensive therapies or other specialized support for their children. Clear links have been established between parents' involvement in children's education and children's success and learning outcomes and these links are even more significant for children with developmental disabilities. By creating a tool that uses machine learning to provide feedback to caregivers, even in communities with few resources and little support, we can improve children's education around the world and can set them up to thrive and succeed.

If awarded the prize, we would use the funding to test the machine learning component of our mobile application with 2,500 families, collect feedback and finalize the full integration of the tool into our mobile application by the end of 2022.

The next phase of our Include2020 mobile application leverages machine learning to provide parents of children with developmental disabilities in low-resource settings access to instant feedback as they implement newly learned practices with their children with developmental disabilities. This technology will increase the fidelity of implementation of parents' inclusive education and developmental disability support practices in their homes regardless of their abilities to pay for expensive therapies or other specialized support for their children. Clear links have been established between parents' involvement in children's education and children's success and learning outcomes and these links are even more significant for children with developmental disabilities. By creating a tool that uses machine learning to provide feedback to caregivers, even in communities with few resources and little support, we can improve children's education around the world and can set them up to thrive and succeed.

If awarded the prize, we would use the funding to test the machine learning component of our mobile application with 2,500 families, collect feedback and finalize the full integration of the tool into our mobile application by the end of 2022.

The majority of our team comes directly from the Arabic-speaking refugee communities that our solution initially serves. Our content creators are Syrian refugees who share experiences with our target users and who intimately understand the challenges faced by our users both in terms of accessing an inclusive education for their children and accessing the supports they need within limited resource contexts. Our solution leverages technology and machine learning to improve access to education for children with developmental disabilities and to provide them with support at the primary school age to give them access to STEM courses and career opportunities that may otherwise have been considered out of reach due to disability discrimination and a lack of support resources. 

If awarded the prize, we would use the funding to test the machine learning component of our mobile application with 2,500 families, collect feedback and finalize the full integration of the tool into our mobile application by the end of 2022 so that families can support their children's learning in math and science and beyond.