Thaki

Thaki’s proposed LEAP project seeks to understand how might we leverage best practices in monitoring and evaluation to glean more authentic insights from the wide variety of users we work with, many of whom access our resources in offline settings.

Thaki has been responding to the Syrian crisis in the Middle East for seven years, providing our target beneficiaries, refugee and vulnerable host community children and their teachers, with digital literacy and e-learning opportunities.

There are 5.5 million refugees and over 7.2 million internally displaced children, in the Middle East and North Africa region (UNICEF, 2022). Many of these children are missing out on their right to quality education, which means that their potential is at risk of being wasted. Sadly, many of the children who are able to enroll in educational systems are attending over-crowded,under-resourced, and impoverished schools. In these establishments, teachers typically have very limited capacities to educate in a nurturing way and to transfer the deep expertise that is needed for children to build future focused skills for gainful employment. In Lebanon, the crippling financial crisis, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, has taken a major toll on an already fragile education system. Continued school disruptions, parents’ inability to financially support their children’s education, and failed infrastructure with power and internet cuts have had a catastrophic impact on all segments of society, not least of whom are the children.

We are 100% dedicated to bridging the digital divide, focusing on digitally illiterate refugee and vulnerable learners, and their teachers who themselves often have very low digital literacy. Targeting remote areas of Lebanon and the Middle East, we have an offline solution developed specifically for communities with no or low connectivity.

Our solution is:

-  Hardware-first. There’s a huge need for digital devices for learners, but a major lack of nonprofits who can supply hardware to schools. This is because of the challenging logistics required. Working with shipping and customs partners, we have become experts in these systems and can therefore fill this gap.

-  Circular economy-driven. By collecting donated lightly-used laptops from corporates, we extend their useful life and avoid creating more e-waste.

-  Available offline. Our resources work smoothly and seamlessly offline - a major benefit in no/low-connectivity environments.

-  Bilingual in English and Arabic. Teachers and learners do not need to struggle with a foreign language to navigate the resources or operating system.

-  Designed to stimulate learners’ imagination. We focus on creativity, social-emotional learning and mindfulness, in order to complement more traditional learning.

-  Teacher-friendly, with digital literacy training and just-in-time lesson plans ready to go when they are needed.

By providing self-guided digital learning resources to teachers and vulnerable and refugee learners across the Middle East and North Africa, we expect to help over 130,000 children to become digitally literate by 2025, and ultimately inspire refugee children to continue their education (independently if required), and reach their full potential

Our Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian team members grew up and / or currently live in crisis-affected contexts, meaning they both represent and deeply understand the needs of their communities.

We regularly connect with our partner organizations to assess and address needs following a user-centered approach. We collect anecdotes and data directly from the teachers and partner organizations using feedback surveys, field observations, testimonials and focus group interviews, then leverage these understandings to inform iteration, design, logistics and more.

1. Surveys are conducted at three levels: with organization heads / school principals, with teachers, and more recently with students.

From our 2021 teacher surveys:

• 85% of teachers surveyed found Thaki’s content informative

• 85% of teachers surveyed found Thaki’s content innovative

Children are learning better with Thaki. According to teachers surveyed:

• 92% positive impact of computers on students’ motivation

• 92% positive impact of computers on students’ learning

2. Testimonials from partners are gathered in a variety of ways such as direct interactions, surveys and social media.

Tripulley: “We were so impressed with the fact that Thaki laptops work without wifi! We struggle with power cuts on a daily basis and we usually are forced to have the children wait for at least two hours until wifi is back again. Yesterday we taught them using Thaki laptops, without the need for wifi, and it was so smooth! I also want to praise the fantastic educational materials loaded on the laptops as I personally have even been enjoying using them and learning, not only the children! Thank you!

“One of our students at HomeSchool has difficulties reading questions and understanding them and it’s been challenging to help her with that. Ever since she started using the educational materials on Thaki laptops, she is prompted whenever she selects the wrong answer, to look again and understand the question better. Since then, her skills have improved significantly, and she is now able to focus and read the questions thoroughly before answering. 

3. Field observations take place both with in-house staff as well as within the content of a recent independent external impact assessment by the Centre for Lebanese Studies (CLS), a research outfit established to undertake impartial and balanced research in the Social Sciences focused on education, refugee rights, social movements, and disability advocacy.

4. Focus groups help us to corroborate quantitative data and glean deeper insights into our user community.

‘Thaki’s laptops had a positive impact on the students who are shy to ask a question, since it gives them the chance to discover an easier way to express their opinion or ideas through these programs’.

Thaki’s long-term goal is that e-learning and digital literacy can help

empower refugee and vulnerable children to learn and thrive through

self-paced, motivational electronic tools and find a direct path out of the

confinement of low-income livelihoods.

• The Need: Refugee and marginalized children out of school are missing

out on their education given the lack of tools and educational material.

• Thaki’s Intervention Activities: Laptops loaded with educational content for offline

learning are given to organizations that are working with the children.

• Output: Students spend some time working on the laptops every week.

• Final Outcome: Increase children’s ability to seek future employment

outside of the confines of low paying jobs due to new skills and mindset.

Short term changes:

• Get laptops from companies

• Load the laptops with quality learning content

• Provide laptops to the children

• Teach soft learning skills to the children

• Teach digital literacy and other core skills to the children

Each element of Thaki’s theory of change is validated by evidence, and thanks to a recent independent evaluation of our impact, we determine ourselves to currently be at Level 4 of Nesta’s Standards of Evidence.

Yet, we want to understand more on topics like:

• the genuine quality and quantity of teaching and learning happening with Thaki devices, especially when used offline,

• which factors and conditions enable teachers to become ‘digital advocates’ in their school communities,

• how to evidence digital skills converting to improved socio-economic outcomes when long term data collection is limited

The Need: global research unfortunately informs us that there are over 15 million out-of-school children between 5 and 14 years old in the MENA region, and another 10 million are at risk of dropping out.

This drives us in two essential ways: firstly, to partner with organizations who work with these underserved populations, and secondly, to source and develop high quality learning content for these Arabic speaking learners.

Thaki’s Intervention Activities: Since Thaki was founded in 2015:

• 22,500 children impacted
• 100 organizations reached
• 2,206 devices distributed
• 1,338 interactive programs from 52 different education providers
• $8 million in device and content value

And specifically in 2021:

• 1,288 devices distributed
• 57 recipient schools/organizations reached
• $4.4 million - in-kind value distributed (laptops and educational content)

The output: Thaki supports our partner organizations and their wider ecosystems in accessing learning digital experiences using Thaki content, devices and other tools.

When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted school operations, the evidence soon revealed a breakdown in two conditions critical to our Theory of Change’s activities and output processes. Firstly, children would not be using Thaki devices inside classrooms and school computer labs and secondly, many teachers at our partner organizations (as well as across the globe) were ill- equipped to teach in remote or blended formats.

Responding to those risks, the Thaki produced a Teacher Digital Toolkit with 40+ training courses, videos and lesson plans, to build teachers’ digital literacy and enable them to use laptops and international learning content confidently and effectively in lessons whether face to face, blended or entirely remote. This toolkit is focused on teaching about the UN SDGs, digital literacy, STEM, life-skills, values, coding, language, and many other competencies.

The outcome: Thaki tracks and measures the impact on both students and their teachers by evaluating:

• Increased confidence in using digital learning tools 

• improved attitudes towards ease and utility of digital tools,

• improved attitudes about learning and learning motivation,

• increased digital skill set,

• increased knowledge and increased confidence to apply their knowledge on how digital skills relate to a variety of life and work settings

Through these indicators we better understand how to refine our offering, better approximating our ultimate goal of unlocking children’s potential.

We currently track and iterate our findings as mentioned previously using feedback surveys, field observations and interviews. We use a specialized impact assessment platform, Whiyse, to analyze this data and report key findings to our donors and publicly in our Annual Report.

Thaki: Advancing digital inclusion and bridging learning gaps by gathering rich evidence on teaching and learning, particularly in offline settings.

Thaki is on track to reach 130,000 vulnerable young people with 4800 devices by the end of 2025. The support of LEAP fellows and the MIT Solve community would help us to tailor our solution and achieve this goal and more in the coming 5 years.

Our project seeks to understand, “How might we identify and implement best practices in monitoring and evaluation asking the right questions to glean the right insights relevant to our context while accounting for offline settings and academic disruptions?”

We would welcome evidence-based recommendations in the form of a report or other means, to help us to determine whether our measurement instruments and /or other assessment tools should be refined, adopted or supplemented to appropriately capture authentic and nuanced data on teaching, learning and leveraging digital skill sets, particularly in offline settings. In refining our impact measurement, we will be able to identify where more value can be added and will further adapt our offering to more strategically embrace learning variability.

Additionally, and very importantly, the research and guidance offered by LEAP fellows stands to benefit countless others across our own and other ecosystems. We would readily share these valuable learnings so as to support other educators serving the underserved and contribute to the knowledge base of the wider field generating collaborative dialogue around catalyzing greater impact.