NaTakallam: building bridges, one language at a time

The topic of refugees exploded in 2015 when the photo of 2-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s dead body on Turkish shores went viral. Since, global displacement continues to rise. Covid-19 has exacerbated the situation and stalled resettlement processes, and displacement due to climate change is accelerating: another 150 million people will become refugees by 2050 (World Bank). Furthermore, the Russian military invasion of Ukraine has displaced an estimated 10-12 million people in just a few short months, with no end to the war in sight.

Millions today have crossed borders yet remain stuck in limbo-in camps, border detention, and host countries that don’t give them legal residency, barring them from the local economy, with little hope on the horizon. Even when formally resettled, refugees face linguistic or cultural barriers to entering a new labor market, in addition to social isolation and stigmatization. According to the UNHCR, developing countries host 85% of the world's refugees, meaning decent work is even harder to come by. Despite this, the response from the most influential global actors continues to be minimal, if not counteractive, and neglects the needs of those fleeing conflict; moreover, the narrative around displacement is characterized by xenophobia and intolerance, and it is given a microphone by major political figures and mass media worldwide. With a lack of human understanding and personal empathy, hostility towards refugees is rising, which is reflected by discrimination in the labor market. But if societies aren’t open to welcoming refugees, it will be hard to impose policies that support them.

We recognize that better work and life opportunities are only possible if the general discourse around migration becomes more open and tolerant; we also see ignorance as one of the main factors for discrimination and closure. Therefore, we seek to solve this problem by promoting education as a means of fostering dialogue, building friendships and cultural bridges, highlighting the value of refugees, and creating a sense of urgency in the global North around the civic and human duty to welcome displaced persons and accommodate the market and society for their needs. In doing this, our work also provides direct income to refugees.

At NaTakallam, we believe in leveraging technology to overcome barriers to employment for highly-skilled refugees, who are often underutilized in their host countries, and to build-bridges across the globe.

Through NGO partners on the ground and a strong network in the humanitarian space, NaTakallam finds, vets and hires refugees and conflict-affected communities. They get interviewed, and assessed for their skills and then boarded onto our team. We provide a space for community, training, and support. Once we have found our tutors, We match them to language users or classrooms based on their level, interest and schedules; language users include individual students, schools, universities, and organizational clients worldwide.

For all of our services, we ensure quality control through a feedback system and support to refugees who aren’t performing.

On the client side, for our B2C offerings, our solution entails curricula and language learning programs, but for the most part it allows the student to pick their preferred conversation topics and pace, which makes for a personalized and tailored experience–which often addresses the journey of the tutor as a forcibly displaced person. NaTakallam changes the narrative around refugees, as passive recipients to aid, and pushes the language learners on the other end to have a better understanding of why refugees are fleeing their homes. This often drives them towards taking action to support refugee initiatives in a deeper capacity–getting involved with local resettlement agencies, engaging in advocacy efforts on behalf of refugees and so forth. 

Translation services are also offered to larger or corporate customers who are interested in diversifying their outsourced services and advancing their SDG goals or their Corporate Social Responsibility. 

We handle the payments, too, allowing both our clients and our teachers to focus on their quality of interaction. As we follow a commission based model, clients pay NaTakallam and we handle the entire payment transfer to our displaced and conflict-affected communities, through a combination of various partnerships on the ground, online fin tech solution payments and more.

 By providing economic opportunities for refugees and conflict-affected individuals, we are not only helping them to build better lives, but we are also promoting cross-cultural understanding and empathy around the world. Through our innovative platform, we are creating a more equitable and inclusive world, one language lesson at a time.

See this Twitter post as a demo of our product.

NaTakallam is a social enterprise with a mission to provide quality language services while empowering refugees and conflict-affected communities worldwide. We have two main groups of beneficiaries: our tutors and translators, who are refugees and conflict-affected individuals, and our global clients and customers.

Through our work with NaTakallam, our tutors and translators receive income opportunities, experience and soft skills, training, community, a sense of dignity and purpose, and a rekindled social network through their students. For many, this leads to resettlement and other job opportunities. Our goal is to provide sustainable income opportunities to as many refugees as possible.

On the client side, we offer affordable, flexible, high-quality, curated language services to individual customers who seek to learn a new language while directly supporting refugee communities. We also serve academic customers who bring us into their classrooms for a unique empathy-building learning experience that fosters global citizenship. Additionally, we offer impactful quality and affordable translation and interpretation services to organizational customers in the private sector. 

Since our establishment, we have had the privilege of working with over 12,000 unique learners from 100 countries, empowering them with language skills and fostering cultural understanding. Notably, our programs have also played a vital role in supporting refugee communities, enabling them to generate $2.8 million in income.

We offer specialized language sessions where learners can directly connect with their tutors through our online platform. We have established partnerships with various organizations, resulting in 2,429 students benefiting from our B2B language learning program. We also collaborate with 75 universities, providing tailored individual sessions to more than 1,441 students. Additionally, we have made a significant impact through cultural exchange and language learning programs in 170 K12 schools, community organizations, and conferences, engaging with approximately 8,000 people.

Over the years, we have formed valuable partnerships with several esteemed organizations and corporations, such as Meta, eBay UK, Twitter, Columbia and Yale University, UNHCR, Save the Children or the OECD, providing them with our expertise in translation and interpretation, cultural exchange, and language learning services.

My parents immigrated to New York from war-stricken Beirut. Every morning, my father would share stories of survival and tending to the medical needs of countrymen, children, and women. The dichotomy of watching my cousins live amidst Beirut's violence and me living so safely in NYC struck me. In 2014, I graduated with my master's degree, with no job lined up and intensely feeling a sense of idleness. I soon realized that idleness is their eternal state for the 1.5M Syrians flooding into my homeland, Lebanon. I had covered Syria as a journalist- the youth who’d stood up for dignity & basic freedoms only to be met with a gruesome crackdown. I saw myself and my family in them and out of that relatedness- NaTakallam was born. I am passionate about the work I do because it supports people who’ve lost everything and are being demonized rather than welcomed & fosters exchange between people and cultures so frequently misunderstood. This, as a Lebanese-American who has lived in Latin America and has learned to connect to multiple cultures, is at the core of my action

The NaTakallam team includes former refugees and migrants, women and PoC,  individuals from dual citizenship backgrounds, conflict backgrounds; some of our refugee tutors have now joined our core team.  We have previously worked in the education, linguistic, tech, humanitarian, and marketing space.

 Our diverse backgrounds make us qualified to understand both sides of our market, the language learners and the conflict-affected communities and to exercise empathy and understand our mission deeply, which adds an incomparable human and personal dimension to the work we do.

As NaTakallam enters its new phase of growth & substantial scaling, we cannot imagine a better community and network than one such as SOLVE.

At this point in NaTakallam’s journey, we are particularly interested in supporting the area of product and tech, which of course, is an area MIT has tremendous expertise in and mentors from. We hope to receive important strategic advice from experts in the Solve and MIT networks, as well as enhanced support on how we measure and track our impact, which is very multifold. We also would like support on how we present this data, as it is very rich and our work has a deep sustainable impact on refugees’ lives, knowing for instance that we have tutors who’ve been with us for close to 7 years and who fully rely on us. 

We, of course, welcome any financial support we can gain through grants. Today, we have clear thoughts on how and where to invest any financial resources, and we also hope to gain further exposure in the media and at conferences, especially given the relevance of the subject matter we’re working on, which will continue to be exacerbated in light of climate change.

Our solution is innovative for multiple reasons. 

First of all, NaTakallam recognized that refugees & displaced people have valuable skills for which there exists a market, especially in today’s virtual and increasingly digital world: language skills. NaTakallam’s innovation lies in disrupting the traditional ways of thinking about refugees: that refugees need to be helped instead of them helping others as instructors, and translators, that full-time employment is not the only path forward, and that freelance digital opportunities can have their benefits too and lastly, that livelihoods don’t need to be limited to physical space and traditional industries. By creating a market where refugees can show their skills and abilities, we challenge intolerant narratives and give our users the opportunity to question their beliefs and become more open-minded.

Secondly, we have created a new marketplace in which refugees and worldwide users meet, all while leveraging technology to address livelihoods in fragile states and situations. Prior to the covid-19 pandemic, NaTakallam’s unique communication infrastructure combined digital communication tools with education for quality learning opportunities, income generation and building bridges that drive people towards action to support displaced and war-stricken communities. 

Thirdly, differently from other language learning services, we provide a cultural and personal component that other services don’t provide. Learners who have a personal connection to the culture or people associated with the target language are more motivated to learn the language. Studies in linguistics confirm that empathy plays a huge role in effective language learning (Guiora et al., 1972). Hence, creating bridges between our conversation partners and our language learners doesn’t only offer the former a chance to share their story, but also the latter to build a more personal connection with the language, therefore accessing a unique service and improving their journey to becoming fluent speakers. 

In terms of scalability and reproducibility, we believe that personalized language teaching can create international communities, which eventually reflect in market expansion: language partners can be recommended by user to user by word of mouth and this can increase their reach to new countries and new students.

Last but not least, by providing groups and institutions (such as corporate actors, academic institutions and organizations) with language learning opportunities, we improve civic attitudes and tolerance on a large scale. This fuels exchange and understanding between often polarized populations and gives refugees their own direct, GLOBAL voice, transcending negative media and political rhetoric.

The dynamic just described works in reverse, too: learning a second language has been proven to enhance one’s intercultural awareness and sensitivity, thus leading to more openness and appreciation for others. The impact that this can have on entire groups and communities of learners, and especially on the youngest, can be truly revolutionary.

Our organization is committed to empowering youth to become active and engaged global citizens through meaningful cross-cultural exchange experiences. Our impact goals for the next year and the next five years are focused on expanding our reach, building core civic competencies, fostering social-emotional learning skills, and enabling learners to bridge their civic knowledge by taking action. All of this happens while we are providing refugees and conflict-affected communities with digital livelihoods.

Over the next year:

•  We plan to expand our virtual exchange program to reach more classrooms and community organizations, particularly those in under-resourced communities. Our aim is to provide access to improved civic action learning in a wide range of contexts, including classroom-based and community-based approaches, with support from trained educators and community leaders. We believe that these exchanges will help learners acquire key civic skills and knowledge, including how to assess the credibility of information, engage across differences, understand their own agency, and address issues of power, privilege, and injustice.

• We also plan to foster social-emotional learning skills, including self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. By providing a safe and supportive environment for learners to develop these competencies, we believe that we can help young people become more confident and engaged leaders in their communities.

Over the next five years:

• We plan to deepen our impact by enabling learners to bridge their civic knowledge by taking action. We want to empower a new generation of young people who are equipped with the skills, knowledge, and values they need to become responsible and engaged global citizens. To achieve this goal, we plan to expand our programs and reach a broader audience of learners. We will continue to partner with a wide range of organizations and institutions, including schools, community organizations, and NGOs.

• We will leverage our existing network of experienced educators and community leaders to train and support program facilitators, and we will use innovative technology platforms to connect learners from different parts of the world. We will also seek to continuously improve our programs through rigorous evaluation and feedback mechanisms, ensuring that we are maximizing our impact and meeting the needs of our learners and partners.

NaTakallam uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to assess its impact.

For our academic programs in schools and universities, we monitor:

• The number of schools and universities we partner with

• The number of schools and universities that renew their partnership with us

• The number of students participating in NaTakallam sessions each semester 

• The number of students successfully completing all assigned NaTakallam sessions each semester 

• The percentage of students reporting satisfaction with their language partner and overall Natakallam experience

• The number of students reporting a change in their understanding of refugee issues 

• The number of students reporting developing friendly relationships with their language partners

• The percentage of teachers and professors reporting being satisfied with NaTakallam sessions' coursework integration

For our B2C offering, we also measure the number of language learners (both cumulative and monthly), as well as their satisfaction and retention rates.

As a large part of raison d’etre is to also provide income to refugees and conflict-affected individuals, we also measure our positive and sustainable impact on their lives by looking at the following:

• The number of tutors and translators working at NaTakallam

• The number of tutors and translators who fully depend on NaTakallam for any income

• Their average monthly revenue 

• The number of clients using NaTakallam services, besides academic partners

They are also surveyed on other aspects more related to their well-being and feeling part of a community, which is at the core of what we are creating. They are surveyed twice yearly on questions about their well-being and the soft skills they learn through NaTakallam (for example, English, technology use, etc.)

NaTakallam has a Theory of Change that centers around creating a sustainable business model that provides gig economy employment opportunities for refugees around the world as language tutors and translators. By building a thriving user base and establishing strong and lasting academic and organizational partnerships, NaTakallam hopes to decrease the loss of human capital resulting from global displacement and increase cross-cultural understanding.

To achieve these goals, NaTakallam has identified several key inputs, outputs, outcomes, and impacts. The inputs include 1) creating the interface of NaTakallam and providing gig economy employment opportunities; 2) provide the opportunity of belonging community through training and mentorship; 3) Establish parterships with academic instituions, NGOs and corporations . The outputs are : 1) the translation and tutoring services that are offered to external clients; 2) refugees make friendships, earn income and gain social capital; 3) clients learn languages in an engaging format at an affordable price. The outcomes include: 1) refugees being able to survive, thrive, integrate, make connections, and restore their self-dignity through friendships, earning income, gaining social capital, and restarting their lives; 2) paying clients get a much needed service with high quality and create meaningful cross cultural connections. The impacts are: 1)  is a shift in the narrative about refugees and integration becoming more positive; 2) users gain unique insights into the refugee crisis and sense of direct contribution on improving refugee livelihoods .

NaTakallam's Theory of Change is based on several assumptions. One assumption is that the demand for NaTakallam's services is large enough to accommodate a sustainable business model. Another assumption is that refugees have the baseline skills and abilities to perform well as language tutors and translators. Additionally, NaTakallam assumes that the political system and civil society in the specific host countries are open to integration, that there is openness to change, and that there is an absence of extremely xenophobic policies and negative communication and discourse.

Overall, NaTakallam's Theory of Change is focused on creating a sustainable business model that benefits refugees, paying clients, and society as a whole. By providing employment opportunities, language services, and cross-cultural understanding, NaTakallam hopes to make a positive impact on the lives of refugees around the world.

We live in the era of the “connected refugee.” Unlike WW2, the previous largest refugee crisis, we now have the internet, which is also transforming the way we respond to crisis and war. Many of today's displaced do have access to the internet and hold skills in technology, web-based platforms, and many other digital fields, coming from more white-collar professions. The technology NaTakallam uses is very simple, in order to allow everyone who has an internet connection to use it. Access to technology and digital literacy is still a huge barrier to entry in the labor market. Even for the most vulnerable refugees who do not yet hold advanced digital skills, unlocking the opportunities in digital work will be key to ensuring their future income opportunities, and players in tech and the telecom sectors are mobilizing to provide mobile and internet access to those who are less connected. 

As NaTakallam is a human-centered social enterprise, we integrate different tools and platforms to connect our students with their Language Partners (LP) manually without employing any AI. We consider this as one of our “forte” in a language market saturated by offers where language learners could easily fall into a “paradox of choice” on other platforms like italki—in NaTakallam, we came up with an intuitive pairing system. Students would sign-up indicating their language level, topics that interest them, their availability and we would pair them with a matching Language Partner who has similar interests and who would be a good-fit for their needs. All the purchases and the scheduling is carried out on our platform.

Employing such a system enabled NaTakallam to provide an impeccable learning experience for students while ensuring that our Language Partner’s personal information stays private, who might be vulnerable and prefer to keep their profiles’ private.

Finally, because our users’ experience is fundamental feedback for us, we make great use of data analytics to measure satisfaction with our services.

As a female-founded organization founded to support mostly Arab refugees who were excluded from the local economy, NaTakallam’s raison d’etre is grounded in principles of diversity and inclusion.

Our team is mostly female, our board is majority female, and most of our tutors and translators are women. In addition, our staff and tutors, and translators include individuals from the LGBT community from across the world, including Latin America, Africa, the MENA region of course, China, and beyond (besides Europe and the Americas); The NaTakallam team includes former refugees and migrants, aligning with our global social enterprise identity. 

NaTakallam is grounded in market needs, those of language learners, translation clients & qualified refugees, which enables refugees to earn an income from high-level, in-demand skills. We offer language learning sessions in nine languages and/or integrated curriculum studies for individuals (B2C). We also partner with organizations (B2B), such as corporates, intergovernmental organizations, NGOs, universities, and schools to enhance cross-cultural communication and understanding.

We follow a commission-based model where

• Language learning and cultural exchange services are charged per hour and sold in bundles with a  30%-40% margin.

• Translation services are charged per word range with a 30% margin, and interpretation services are charged per hour. The translation department also offers a subscription model.

Our organization has developed a comprehensive plan for achieving financial sustainability that includes a combination of fundraising, earned revenue, and partnership opportunities.

In terms of fundraising, we plan to continue pursuing grants from a variety of sources, including private foundations, corporations, and government agencies. We will also focus on cultivating relationships with individual donors who are passionate about our mission and can provide sustained support for our programs. Our fundraising efforts will be bolstered by our commitment to transparency and accountability, as we will regularly communicate with our supporters and provide regular updates on our progress and impact.

In addition to fundraising, we plan to generate revenue through the sale of products and services related to our mission. For example, we will develop and sell curriculum materials and training programs to schools and community organizations looking to integrate our approach to civic action learning and cross-cultural exchange into their own programming. We will also offer consulting services to organizations and institutions seeking to develop their own cross-cultural exchange programs, leveraging our expertise and experience in this area.

Another key component of our revenue strategy is to pursue partnership opportunities with other organizations and institutions that share our values and goals. We will seek to collaborate with like-minded entities on joint programming and initiatives, which will allow us to expand our impact while also generating revenue through shared funding and sponsorship opportunities.

Finally, we plan to explore the possibility of raising investment capital to fund our growth and expansion in the long term. While we are committed to remaining a non-profit organization, we recognize that there may be opportunities to raise investment capital from impact investors who share our vision and values. This capital will be used to develop new programs and initiatives, expand our reach and impact, and build a sustainable organizational infrastructure that can support our mission for years to come.

Over the years, NaTakallam has steadily grown thanks to a combination of non-dilutive grants and self-generated revenue through our clearly proven, successful offerings. Grants (5- 200K worth in value) have come from foundations, but also from competitions from the World Bank, Columbia University, Vital Voices, Cartier Women’s Initiative and more, including the specific MIT Innovate for Refugees Competition and MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge.

After receiving the majority of our grants within the first two years, NaTakallam was able to grow its team by five fold and increase its self  generated revenue by four folds, surpassing the milestone of $1 million USD in annual revenue. 

Moreover, investing our grant in our platform and technical product allows us to ensure our sustainability, by lowering our overhead cost and creating the technical capacity to dramatically grow our user base. The next step in our sustainability plan is to widen the scope of users in order to sustain any unexpected changes in the business cycles. This strategy was already proven successful during the pandemic where NaTakallam was able to maintain its growth by shifting its main source of revenue to B2C language learning sessions as opposed to B2B clients who were struggling at the time. 

We aim to hit USD$2.5 million in annual revenue by 2025 (in 2 years), and 3.5 USD million by 2028. This will allow us to break even by 2025 (in 2 years) , after heavy investments in technology and enhanced UX experience, as well as development and marketing. The driving factor behind our growth will be to target more organizational clients, including government, corporate and NGO clients for our language learning  and translation services. For our B2C language learning services, our growth will rely on three axes. Firstly, we are working on an improved learning experience with synchronous video sessions, and asynchronous learning content. This content will be generated by the hundreds of current refugee tutors that NaTakallam has, who have generated and tested their content for the past years. Secondly, with funding, we hope to develop a targeted and strategic marketing campaign to identify and focus on individuals who want to learn a language while having a positive long-term impact. Finally, we’ll grow through the diversification of languages and potentially new online teaching services and curriculum development, which will make us even more competitive. For example, we developed an Arabic curriculum, which not only offers a comprehensive study program which is comparable to that of ivy league programs, but also allows us to secure more long-term revenue from our language program directly - independently of external funding. Once we hit an economy of scale, we will be financially sustainable, if not profitable.