Thaki

Our vision is to eliminate inequity brought about by poverty, war and disasters and to foster a world in which we sustainably share our resources and help one another with compassion and benevolence.

Our mission is to empower refugee and vulnerable children to learn and thrive through self-paced, motivational electronic tools.

Rudayna is Thaki’s founder and CEO and as such leads the organization guiding its work at the micro, meso and macro levels. She is an exceptional community leader and has inspired leaders at hundreds of partner organizations to support Thaki’s mission: from global banks and management consultancies (to donate their lightly-used laptops), to ed-tech companies (inspiring them to give Thaki their content for free) to grass-roots nonprofits (to implement Thaki computer labs and use Thaki’s teacher training). 

Rudayna’s work is inclusive in nature. Her team is 70% women and includes people from the East and West, many from minority groups. Her focus on partnership and a common sense of humanity is building a better model for a truly inclusive approach to education and technology.

Rudayna sets and leads the organization’s vision and strategic direction and manages the Thaki’s senior team members, leads the quarterly board meetings, and nurtures partnerships with industry leaders.

Thaki’s founder and CEO, Rudayna Abdo (Team Lead), and Thaki’s operations manager, Mariam Khalaf (Supporting team member), are the two key decision makers within the organization, each with broad exposure to every aspect of Thaki’s processes and operational systems.

Both Rudayna and Mariam lead on the data collection and analytics that steer Thaki’s strategy, and both women have been involved in Thaki’s previous research endeavors. Rudayna and Mariam are each well positioned and eager to engage with a LEAP project as Team Lead and senior staff respectively.

Improving Thaki’s evidence base is a top priority as we prepare to scale and grow in the future, and the timing of the LEAP opportunity is in fact very aligned with our other organizational commitments.

Prior to the first wave of LEAP, Thaki will be closing two major projects; one realized in partnership with the Dutch-based organization TNO and the other with UK-based Theirworld. Additionally, Thaki will have also recently finished an optimization and rebuild project involving two of our core products, the Thaki app and the Teacher Digital Toolkit.

During both the first and second waves of LEAP, Thaki’s operations will be ongoing, and though Rudayna and Mariam will be involved at a higher level on other projects, their responsibilities to those projects are not time intensive.

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

In the Middle East and North Africa, 5.5 million refugees and over 7.2 million internally displaced children are not getting a quality education (UNICEF, 2022). 

Schools for these children are overstretched and under-resourced and often lack access to stable internet and electricity, let alone quality teacher training and modern technology. World-class education is available only to the most privileged learners: an economic and digital divide which widens every day.

Thaki operates, primarily in Lebanon and Jordan, to combat that educational crisis.

1. We collect gently used electronic devices from organizations who donate them to us. We repurpose the devices and give them new life.

2. We load the devices with educational content housed in the platform we developed to integrate a variety of informative, interactive, and educational programs, all available offline.

3. We distribute the devices to education centers that work with refugee and vulnerable children.

4. We provide training resources and tools to support teachers and children in e-learning and digital literacy

In doing this work, Thaki also addresses an environmental crisis - the millions of computers that are discarded yearly, damaging health and environments and wasting precious materials.

Our solution is:

-  Solving one of the hardest challenges! Very few organizations offer education hardware: it’s logistically complex and margins are low. We innovated along the entire supply chain to find, ship, test, image, and distribute laptops to schools and learning centers who need them most.

-  Doing green tech for a circular economy. Our technology does not come at the environment’s expense. Used devices donated by companies have a second life in schools. Plus we offset our carbon, and are piloting solar energy for computer labs.

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

-  Bilingual in Arabic and English . Teachers and learners do not need to struggle with a foreign language to navigate the resources or operating system, but do have the opportunity to build their additional language skills, if desired.

-  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.

-  Scalable and replicable. We are growing where we started and the model can also be easily adapted and replicated in other countries and contexts.

By offering content in a variety of levels (primary, secondary, technical/vocational), formats (text, audio, video, kinesthetic) and languages (Arabic, English, and to a lesser extent, French) Thaki is designed to embrace learning variability rather than prescribe a one-size-fits-all approach.

Our teacher training and Teacher Digital Toolkit (our online learning hub for teacher professional development) provide dedicated guidance on how educators can leverage technology to meet the student where they are and foster growth tailored to their individual needs within themselves, in groups and across contexts.

In providing these 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.

Thaki has conducted various types of foundational and formative research that help us to better understand and demonstrate our effectiveness. These include:

1. On-going foundational research around digital learning, digital literacy, refugee and vulnerable learners, teacher professional development, tech innovations and sector developments, all of which continuously informs our work.

2. Project-specific foundational research, for example to develop the methodology and design of the Teacher Digital Toolkit, Thaki’s online learning hub for teacher professional development.

3. Ongoing formative research such as our annual user feedback surveys, which gather information on our users' age and sex, their technical skills and experience using laptops, their software and program-specific skills, their intention to use Thaki devices regularly, and importantly, their perceptions of the motivation, focus and fun in learning as a result of using Thaki.

4. Project-specific formative research such as pre and post measures customized for discrete projects, an example of this being the teacher mentoring program we are currently running through a project funded by Theirworld, where we are studying the impact of dedicated coaching and mentorship on teachers’ digital skills and confidence.

5. Other project-specific formative research such as the feasibility study conducted ahead of creating our social emotional learning program (“Nour”). The study examined the viability of the technical, economic and other aspects of the proposed project.

Other project-specific formative research being the implementation study (currently in progress) on our social emotional learning program (“Nour”) to understand both the program’s effects and how it produces impact. This research will be leveraged to inform the program’s future scale-up.

Data collected from research and studies reveal valuable insights that guide us in how we move forward with product refinement and development.

Annual user feedback surveys, gathering school leaders’, teachers’ and students’ perspectives through self-reporting, allow us to discover a multitude of characteristics of our users. Through these surveys we know, for example, that our users are more likely to use Thaki devices for word processing and educational games rather than for graphics applications. With these understandings we make strategic decisions on the type, format and frequency of support we offer educators, the sort of content we curate and create, the approach we take to UX UI design and more.

Other research has guided us on either the viability or validation of specific programs and products.

Before embarking on the development of a social emotional learning program in partnership with Dutch-based research and innovation organization, TNO, we conducted a feasibility study. In doing so, a genuine market need and a significant impact potential were identified, as was complementarity in Thaki and TNO’s experience and expertise relative to the project tasks. From these revelations, we entered a new work stream as an organization, the co-creation of co-branded content.

In another example, to validate our work in supporting the digital literacy and digital confidence of students and their teachers, we commissioned an independent impact evaluation from the research organization, Centre for Lebanese Studies (CLS) in 2022.

Through a mixed methods approach, CLS used qualitative and quantitative measures to identify significant increases in students’ and teachers’ confidence and skills using Thaki laptops. The evaluation also revealed improvements in students’ academic skills as well as  students’ perceptions of their own educational performance, their likelihood to participate in class and their frequency of engaging with educational technology. Similarly, teachers were found to report an increase in digital skills and confidence associated with their teaching.

Recommendations from this impact evaluation included the provision of newer laptops, more Arabic-specific content and the alignment of content with national curricula. Thanks to these recommendations we have taken steps to modify our educational platform and offerings, we intentionally created and curated more content in Arabic such as our social-emotional learning program “Nour”, and we are making adaptations to our platform and the Teacher Digital Toolkit for clearer alignment to learning standards and outcomes (summer 2023).

Through feedback surveys, field observations, interviews and more we track and monitor indicators of the effectiveness of our work in various contexts. To analyze this data and report key findings to our donors and publicly in our Annual Report, we use a specialized impact assessment platform, Whyise. Whyise helps us align with global standards compliance (UN SDGs) and streamline reporting through data collection, management, tracking and reporting, as well as supporting us with analysis to identify correlations between our stakeholders, the activities and services we provide to them and the change in outcomes. This insight helps us better plan, design and identify the variables that influence outcomes.

Yet, we want to understand more to better enable our impact and growth.

Now is a critical time for Thaki to build these deeper insights through the support of a LEAP project as we are in the nascent stages of a forthcoming expansion into North Africa and a broader scale up across the region in the next 3 - 5 years. 

Improving the quality of our methods and measures would crucially enable us to improve as an organization in our existing geographies as well as better position us for new locales.

The more specificity we have around the predictors of the outcomes we aim to achieve, the more equipped we become to better serve learners and better address learner viability. 

Armed with correlational evidence like the duration threshold of exposure needed to lead to an identified outcome, or the relationship between teachers’ digital literacy skills and those of their students, Thaki can adapt and adopt more effective approaches for impact at scale.

We would like the LEAP project to guide us in how best to understand: 

1. What conditions make Thaki effective in improving digital literacy in students and teachers?

2. What conditions make Thaki effective in improving attitudes and motivation towards learning in students?

3. Who does Thaki work best for, and, who does it not work for?

We would welcome evidence-based recommendations in the form of a report or other means, to help us determine whether our measurement instruments and other assessment tools should be refined, adapted or supplemented to appropriately capture authentic and nuanced data on what features and conditions support Thaki’s effectiveness in improving digital literacy and improving attitudes and motivation towards learning by those we serve.

The Fellows research expertise exceeds our own, so we invite feedback to the preliminary ideas below, but we believe we would benefit greatly from outputs like:

• Guidance on integrating correlational studies or other measures into our evidence base.

• Guidance on collecting longitudinal data from our students given the difficulty in identification of students (no email addresses, difficulty in getting student ID numbers, data privacy concerns).

• Recommendations on the ethical considerations around randomized control studies involving educational opportunities for children, (perhaps this being better suited to a quasi-experimental format).

• Commentary on the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Framework we are currently developing.

We anticipate that the outputs from this study will lead to specific actions including the following:

• Make any necessary changes to our survey instruments, including specific adaptations of the surveys to our different geographies and/or demographics.

• Make any changes to our qualitative data gathering methodology and frequency.

• Identify any gaps in our research and, correspondingly, what new studies we need to undertake to close these gaps. 

• Modify our teacher support and training tools.

• Curate and/or create different types of content for learners and/or teachers.

• Procure specific devices, tools or services that facilitate users to achieve identified outcomes.

As mentioned previously, if we have more specificity around the predictors of the outcomes we wish to achieve we will be better able to address learner variability of our target audience. This will both help us address the needs of our learners as well as equip us with the right tools to scale effectively.

We imagine finishing LEAP with a heightened research acumen that will first and foremost, extend the depth and breadth of our impact in improving digital literacy and attitudes and motivation towards learning.

- Following changes to our survey instruments as well as their methodology and frequency, we expect, in the short term, richer understanding of the needs of existing and ideal user groups as well as the conditions surrounding their use of Thaki devices and content. This will elicit, in the longer-term, strategic outreach to groups whose needs and conditions match our existing and future offerings, and eventual expansion to new locales and settings, with more efficient and effective impact.

- Subsequent to the identification of gaps in our research, we expect, in the short term, to identify what new studies we need to undertake to close these gaps, leading to the mapping of potential opportunities and partners to support our research aims, and eventually the enhancement of our evidence base, increasing our credibility and reputation with stakeholders and other sector actors, giving us greater potential for leadership, influence and impact.

- With modified teacher support and training tools, targeted content for learners, and supporting tools and services, in the short-term Thaki will engage more meaningfully and effectively with teachers and students, leading to longer term outcomes of the organization developing greater brand recognition and reputation with educator and learner communities, and increasing demand for our products and services, all while deepening our impact.

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.