Academia

For over a decade, Libya has been at the intersection of civil conflict, infrastructure deterioration, and, most recently in the Eastern city of Derna, natural disaster. For Libya’s healthcare sector, the result has been devastating. At the height of the conflict, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, and thousands more were killed or injured. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), medical facilities were often targeted by armed groups, forcing scores of hospitals and clinics to suspend services or close completely. In 2019, more people were killed in Libya as a result of assaults on health-care facilities than in any other country worldwide. Years of fighting, instability, and economic decline resulted in an exodus of both foreign and Libyan health workers, which further undermined the sector and reduced the quality of care. 

Like health inequities globally, health disparities in Libya have ballooned, particularly affecting marginalized communities such as migrants, refugees, internally displaced persons, women and girls, and children and the elderly. Women and girls, for example, face formidable barriers to accessing healthcare services, with only 15-20% of women able to access reproductive care (UN Women 2020/WHO 2020).

Amidst growing healthcare needs, however, Libya’s healthcare sector is headed towards complete collapse. Centrally, the conflict’s drainage of resources and medical staff has meant a reduced capacity to provide care. There is a dire need for adequately training new medical personnel, and providing existing medical staff with the re-skilling required to serve Libya’s increasingly vulnerable population. 

Indeed, reduced medical and educational infrastructure has meant that Libyan healthcare professionals are neither able to efficiently scale their own work or maximize their expertise. Furthermore, a lack of new medical personnel has contributed to a growing gap between Libya’s healthcare capacity and needs, leaving an entire generation of medical students unable to administer quality care to Libya’s population. 

Revitalizing Libya’s healthcare capacity has proved difficult without the educational tools necessary to re-skill senior health professionals, train medical students, and realize a life-long learning approach, where medical staff are constantly evolving to urgent healthcare needs, fluctuating health challenges, and new, life-saving technologies as they are introduced. The administration of quality care to vulnerable populations in particular is predicated on adequate knowledge of those populations’ healthcare needs and how to address them, knowledge that most medical professionals have not had comprehensive access to in over a decade. 

Unfortunately, while the state of Libya’s current healthcare system is especially dire, other conflict-affected states face similar challenges in maintaining their healthcare personnel, since conflicts often result in the max exodus of healthcare professionals from a given region or country (PLOS, 2020). Indeed, in 2023, almost 80% of African countries were experiencing medical staff shortages, with even non-conflict affected culturally comparable countries like Egypt grappling with 65% of doctors having left the country to work elsewhere (WHO 2023; Africa Report, 2023). As such, many both conflict-affected zones and zones with relative stability suffer from a lack of healthcare workers, demonstrating the need for increased capacity building in the health sector. 

In the context of Libya and many other conflict-affected countries, Academia presents the first and only effort to revitalize the healthcare sector, by scaling up in-country care capacity and ensuring the administration of quality care to vulnerable populations. Today, few alternative approaches exist to sustainably address the healthcare collapse amidst insecurity, fragmented governance, and resource scarcity. Academia provides sustainable, accessible, quality education to health-care and health-care adjacent personnel, ultimately establishing vertical and horizontal impact that is sustainable by reimagining who, how and why we train in-country community members to provide much needed medical assistance.

As such, Academia will comprise of three primary functions: 

1. Provide senior medical professionals with recurrent training modules, ensuring they are maximizing their care capacity and learning new skills, technologies, and techniques that can help them deal with emerging health challenges in times of crisis.

2. Give health-care adjacent first responders and social workers the basic health-care training necessary to serve marginalized populations in scarce-resource regions, ensuring quality care to women, children, and migrants. 

3. Digitally train the next generation of in-country medical professionals, safeguarding against ruptures in training caused by conflict and natural disaster, and reducing the impact of max-exoduses of healthcare workers. 

Academia’s approach opens a new, unique trajectory for systemic change of the collapsing healthcare systems in conflict-affected and post-conflict countries. It equalizes access for underserved and intentionally overlooked populations, and invests in resilient systems which are designed to respond to and outlast crises. Academia’s governance-focused, community-centered, and open-partnership approach ensures that Academia’s digital tech solutions are tailored to a community’s need, ie. reflective of Libya’s high school curriculum and medical needs. As such, Academia remains embedded in a collaborative ecosystem that focuses on delivering impact to hard-to-reach communities otherwise ignored by market stakeholders.

For large swaths of patients in Libya, accessing care today is near impossible. Seeing any specialist care provider beyond a local nurse may mean a 500 mile trip to the capital or even a flight into a neighboring country. By providing medical training to first responders and social workers, and ensuring that the next generation of medical professionals complete the training they need, Academia ensures that care becomes more accessible to those who need it most. Furthermore, in providing medical professionals with opportunities for life-long learning, Academia ensures that previously fragmented and unstable healthcare systems become more robust and resilient, making them less likely to collapse and more likely to develop with and alongside evolving crises. 

Academia represents a breakthrough in e-learning platforms in the region too. Easy, accessible, and user friendly, with a simple UX/UI design made with healthcare professionals in mind, Academia offers mobile website or app capabilities that can accommodate offline-streaming of videos and modules, helping combat a lack of reliable internet connectivity. 

Currently, Academia serves 48,278 verified users, 28,835 of whom have made in-app purchases for educational materials, like high-quality courses and live webinars. Academia’s educational resources–which include high quality video tutorials and traditional learning resources like lectures and notes–ensure that learning can occur, even in a self-paced, oft-disrupted environment. To help instructors track their students' progress, amidst road closures and flashes of violence, Academia also offers online questions and tests that can help instructors tailor their teaching to the needs of their students.

Offering over 1908 courses taught by 97 instructors, Academia mainly serves vulnerable, conflict-affected communities, as part of the broader Academia network, which includes Academia health remote visits, records, and patient treatment. Embedded within this network, Academia is particularly effective, as it is able to tap into a pre-existing network of people–patients and healthcare providers alike. 

Project budget is needed to support the development of new content for Academia, which will include modules that cover health education, including basic health and nutrition, in addition to health rights subjects such as bodily autonomy. Age appropriate CSE modules will also be developed and will include modules such as GBV, girl/women's rights and gender equality, FGM and child marriage. Modules will also be developed for capacity building of community based structures and organizations, in addition to community health workers (CHW) and peer to peer education and health awareness models for youth leaders. 

To ameliorate the issue of access to education, Academia developed a comprehensive e-learning platform that provides a unique solution that caters to students from various backgrounds and contexts. One key consideration in building an accessible and equitable platform, was understanding internet constraints within the MENA region, and was therefore essential to develop an easy-to-use platform that offers both mobile application and mobile friendly website versions. Furthermore, the platform was developed to only require low bandwidth and speeds to operate, to offer greater access. Additionally, it is possible to have offline streaming options, where students can download videos as encrypted files whilst at school, library or cafe etc. and view them later without internet. Another important consideration for equitable access was understanding that within the target region, there are issues of digital divide and lower tech literacy, making it imperative that the platform was intuitive and easy to use for all. 

In addition to providing trained and training medical professionals with the educational resources they need to succeed, Academia uniquely serves supporting humanitarian workers already on the frontlines of responding to emergencies. As such, providing these humanitarian workers with crucial educational resources regarding the provision of psychological support to ptsd patients or the context-specific needs of refugee patients has proven invaluable, helping serve Libya’s most vulnerable local communities. 

I grew up in Libya, where I witnessed first-hand the gap between healthcare providers and healthcare needs. As such, I trained as a surgeon, before embarking on my journey as a health-tech entrepreneur with an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, where I was a Center for Public Leadership Fellow and Edward S. Mason Fellow. I received an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and, in 2017, founded Speetar, an AI-enabled telehealth platform awarded by Harvard and supported by MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund. Piloted in Libya and currently being scaled across the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, Speetar links under-served patients in low resource settings to a global pool of cultural and language-matched medical specialists.

Over the past decade, I have watched as Libya’s healthcare situation has deteriorated, leaving vulnerable patients without the care they deserve. After watching the success of Speetar Health, in providing vulnerable communities across the MENA region with telehealth capabilities, I decided to complement our impactful work with launching Academia to solve a key challenge that my work with Speetar had revealed: the lack of quality training and education for healthcare workers and frontline service providers in conflict-affected countries. 

Currently, Academia serves 48,278 verified users, 28,835 of whom have made in-app purchases for educational materials, like high-quality courses and live webinars. Academia’s educational resources–which include high quality video tutorials and traditional learning resources like lectures and notes–ensure that learning can occur, even in a self-paced, oft-disrupted environment. To help instructors track their students' progress, amidst road closures and flashes of violence, Academia also offers online questions and tests that can help instructors tailor their teaching to the needs of their students.

Offering over 1908 courses taught by 97 instructors, Academia mainly serves vulnerable, conflict-affected communities, as part of the broader Academia network, which includes Academia health remote visits, records, and patient treatment. Embedded within this network, Academia is particularly effective, as it is able to tap into a pre-existing network of people–patients and healthcare providers alike.

Academia is therefore transitioning out of a pilot stage and transitioning to scale. It has not completed a (pre)seed investment round yet, however. 

As activists, community builders, and champions of education, our team understands the importance of thought leadership both personally and professionally. As a part of MIT Solve, we would be eager to learn from thought leaders–in technology, health and education. We would welcome the opportunity to engage with one of the world's leading educational institutions, as an enterprise deeply committed to the educational prospects of our community’s most vulnerable. Through Solve in particular, we hope to lean into a network of leaders remedying health challenges, thus ensuring we can maximize our impact as an enterprise saddling between the ed-tech space and the health-tech space. Indeed, we are not only aligned with Solve's mission of promoting access to sustainable technology solutions through diverse entrepreneurship but also share its holistic and interdisciplinary approach to driving change. As a team of changemakers, we are committed to addressing systemic challenges faced by our communities through innovation.

The guidance Solve provides as well as the access to new partners will help us develop further our innovations expanding the capacity of Academia as a service/platform and the capacity of our providers in turn. With access to other Solvers and experts who also know what it means to bring quality solutions to vulnerable populations, we will no doubt make incredible strides toward our goals as the knowledge base grows and our capabilities transform. Further, our MIT student roots as a company and our recognition from MIT Legatum Center will only evolve with Solve as we move from a group of student innovators to a group of industry disruptors, bringing technology, education, and health together.

Speetar Academia introduces a transformative approach to healthcare education in conflict-affected regions by providing a digital platform with offline capabilities, ensuring continuous access to training despite infrastructure challenges. This platform not only serves traditional healthcare providers but also extends crucial training to first responders and community health workers, broadening the base of medically knowledgeable personnel directly within communities. Its scalable and sustainable model enables rapid expansion and localization across different regions, potentially transforming healthcare education globally. By fostering continuous learning through regularly updated modules that reflect the latest medical advancements and crisis management strategies, Speetar Academia keeps healthcare professionals at the cutting edge of practice. The platform democratizes access to quality healthcare education, challenging traditional market dynamics where such education is centralized in stable, urban centers. This shift not only stimulates local economies by keeping healthcare professionals within their communities, thereby reducing brain drain but also builds a more distributed and resilient healthcare system. By empowering local communities and creating jobs, Speetar Academia sets a precedent for using digital innovation to enhance community resilience and catalyze broader social impacts, serving as a model for other sectors in conflict zones.

Outputs:

1. Enhanced Skills and Knowledge among Healthcare Providers: Immediate improvement in the clinical skills and knowledge of healthcare workers, as evidenced by completion rates of training modules and pre/post-training assessment scores.
2. Increased Capacity to Address Medical Needs: First responders and community health workers gain basic healthcare skills, enabling them to assist in primary care and emergency situations.
3. Sustainable Learning Environment: A self-sustaining learning environment is established through the platform's ability to update and adapt content based on the latest medical research and health crises.

Outcomes:

1. Improved Healthcare Delivery: Trained healthcare providers are more capable and confident in their clinical roles, leading to improved healthcare delivery in their respective communities. This is measured by feedback from healthcare recipients, reductions in preventable health issues, and improved response times to medical emergencies.
2. Reduced Healthcare Disparities: Vulnerable populations, including displaced persons, women, and children, receive better healthcare services, leading to narrower health disparities. Surveys and health outcome data collected before and after the intervention will quantify improvements.
3. Strengthened Healthcare System Resilience: By training a broader spectrum of community members, the local healthcare system becomes more robust, better prepared to handle ongoing conflicts, and less susceptible to the effects of brain drain.

Overall, Speetar Academia's approach is designed to strengthen the healthcare infrastructure from the ground up, empowering those within conflict zones to not only survive but thrive despite challenging circumstances, thereby creating a model for replication in similar contexts globally.

Impact Goals for Speetar Academia:

1. Increase the Capacity and Quality of Healthcare Services in Conflict-Affected Areas: Our goal is to enhance the abilities of healthcare providers and first responders in areas disrupted by conflict, ultimately improving health outcomes and access to medical services for vulnerable populations.

2. Build Resilience in Healthcare Systems: Strengthen the healthcare infrastructure to withstand current and future challenges, including conflict, migration, and resource scarcity, ensuring a sustainable and resilient healthcare environment.

3. Reduce Healthcare Disparities: Narrow the gap in healthcare access and quality between affected and more stable regions, particularly for marginalized groups such as women, children, and displaced persons.

Measurement of Progress:

To track our progress towards these impact goals, we are employing several specific indicators:

1. Training and Education Metrics:

• Number of Healthcare Workers Trained: Track the total number of healthcare providers, first responders, and community health workers who complete our training modules.
• Completion Rates of Training Programs: Monitor the percentage of participants who complete the training courses, as a measure of engagement and effectiveness of the platform.
• Pre and Post Training Assessments: Evaluate the improvement in knowledge and skills through assessments conducted before and after the training modules.

2. Healthcare Delivery and Impact Metrics:

• Patient Outcomes: Monitor changes in health outcomes for patients treated by healthcare workers who have undergone our training. This includes measures such as reduced mortality rates, improved recovery times, and lower complication rates.
• Service Delivery Efficiency: Assess improvements in the efficiency of healthcare service delivery, such as reduced waiting times and increased numbers of patients seen by trained professionals.

3. Systemic Change and Resilience Metrics:

• Healthcare System Resilience Index: Develop and utilize an index to measure the resilience of healthcare systems in targeted areas, considering factors such as system responsiveness, adaptability to crises, and continuity of care.
• Healthcare Access and Equity: Measure changes in healthcare access and equity, particularly for vulnerable populations, using indicators such as the rate of healthcare service utilization among marginalized groups.

4. Sustainable Development Goal Alignment:

• We align our indicators with relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly:
  • SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being): Indicators like the number of healthcare providers trained per 1,000 people, and reduction in mortality due to lack of healthcare.
  • SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities): Monitoring improvements in access to healthcare services among underserved populations.

Data Collection and Analysis:

• Data Collection Tools: Utilize digital tracking tools within the Speetar Academia platform to automatically collect data on training completion and assessments.
• Surveys and Feedback: Regular feedback from users and patients to assess the qualitative impact of training on healthcare delivery.
• Partnerships with Local Health Authorities: Collaborate with local health authorities to gather broader healthcare data and validate improvements in health outcomes.

These indicators help us continuously refine our approach, ensuring that Speetar Academia not only meets its immediate educational objectives but also contributes to long-term, transformative changes in healthcare provision and resilience in conflict-affected regions.

Academia leverages a sophisticated digital platform to revolutionize education in conflict-affected regions, focusing on healthcare training and broader educational needs. This technology is pivotal in addressing the educational void created by regional instabilities, providing a resilient solution to the ongoing challenges in the MENA region and beyond.

1. Learning Management System (LMS):

• Functionality: Academia is built on a robust LMS that supports a range of interactive and engaging educational formats including web courses, live webinars, and a developing app for multiple systems. This LMS facilitates structured learning through video lessons, quizzes, practice questions, and model answers.

• Access: Available via academia.ly, the system is designed for easy access through both a web page and mobile applications that are in development, ensuring flexibility in learning environments.

2. Offline Capabilities:

• Streaming and Downloads: Understanding the limitations of internet connectivity in conflict zones, the platform includes features for offline streaming. Videos can be downloaded as encrypted files when internet access is available (e.g., at schools, libraries, or cafes) and viewed later, maintaining content security and user flexibility.

• Encryption: To protect against piracy and unauthorized sharing, the platform uses DRM (Digital Rights Management) technologies, ensuring that downloaded materials remain within the ecosystem of registered users.

3. User Experience (UX)/User Interface (UI) Design:

• Simplicity and Accessibility: The design of Academia prioritizes ease of use, with a simple and intuitive UI that accommodates users who may not be technologically savvy. This is crucial for inclusivity, particularly for users in regions with lower tech literacy.

• Mobile and Low Bandwidth Optimization: The app and web interfaces are optimized for mobile use and low bandwidth conditions, making the platform accessible even in remote areas with unstable internet services.

4. Scalable Content Delivery:

• Course Range and Customization: The platform offers a diverse range of courses tailored to the Libyan curriculum and adaptable to other regional educational systems. This includes high-demand subjects like medicine, engineering, and humanitarian training.

• Continuous Content Update: Courses are regularly updated to ensure they remain relevant and effective. Feedback mechanisms and data analytics help in understanding user needs and adapting the course offerings accordingly.

5. Security and Data Protection:

• High-Level Security Software: To address concerns about content security, particularly from instructors worried about intellectual property theft, Academia employs advanced security measures comparable to those used by leading streaming services like Netflix.

• Secure Data Handling: All user data is encrypted, and the platform includes mechanisms for secure data deletion, ensuring compliance with international standards like GDPR.

Integration with Local Systems:

• Adaptation to Local Needs: Academia is designed to seamlessly integrate with local educational systems, providing tools and content that are directly applicable to the users' educational contexts. This includes partnerships with local institutions to ensure alignment with national curricula and professional standards.

17 FT

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Gender equality and inclusion will be a key priority for the scaling of Academia’s work in the southern region, where inequality, exclusion, and discrimination are particularly entrenched. A gendered approach is at the core of our Health Dots project design. It will be at the center of the project’s inception consultations (highlighting women’s (reproductive) health and mental health), implementation, evaluation, and sustainability strategy. Achieving inclusive and gender-equal healthcare access acts as a great equalizer, as highlighted in the SDGs, with many crucial other gender equality indicators (e.g., education, economic participation, climate change) closely associated.

The business model for Academia is designed to deliver significant educational value to students, healthcare professionals, and first responders in conflict-affected regions, while also ensuring financial sustainability through a scalable and adaptable revenue structure. Here’s a detailed breakdown of how Academia provides its services and generates revenue:

1. Students and Learners: These include high school and university students who require supplementary educational materials and courses aligned with their curriculum, especially in subjects like sciences, mathematics, and various professional courses such as medicine and engineering.

2. Healthcare Professionals and First Responders: Individuals in these roles benefit from specialized training modules that enhance their capacity to provide care in challenging environments.

3. Educational Institutions and Governments: These entities seek effective, scalable solutions to bolster local educational infrastructures, particularly in regions where traditional educational systems have been disrupted by conflict.

1. Digital Educational Content: Academia offers a range of courses, from high school subjects to advanced university and professional training in healthcare. These courses are available in video format, with some live sessions and supplementary materials.

2. Certification and Training for Professionals: This includes accredited courses that provide certification for professional development, particularly valuable for medical and emergency response personnel.

3. Customizable Learning Solutions for Institutions: Academia works with universities and schools to digitalize their courses and integrate them into their curriculum, offering a blended learning approach that enhances their existing educational programs.

• Online Platform: All content is delivered through an online platform that supports both web and mobile access, accommodating users with varying levels of internet access through low bandwidth requirements and offline capabilities.

• Localized Content: Courses are tailored to align with local curricula and professional standards, ensuring relevance and applicability.

• Continuous Updates and Support: The platform is regularly updated with new content to reflect the latest educational standards and learning methodologies. Technical and customer support is available to assist users with any issues they encounter

Academia's plan for achieving financial sustainability is built on a robust model that blends revenue generation through direct sales of educational content, institutional partnerships, and potential for investment capital or grants. The goal is to ensure that revenue streams not only cover operational expenses but also fund continuous development and expansion.

1. Direct Sales of Courses:

   • Individual Users: Academia offers a range of educational courses for students at different educational levels. Users pay either a one-time fee or subscribe to access a library of courses. This includes high-demand subjects like sciences, mathematics, and professional courses such as engineering and healthcare.
   • Certification Programs: For professionals, particularly in healthcare and technical fields, Academia provides specialized training courses that culminate in certification, which is often necessary for career advancement.

2. Institutional Partnerships:

   • Educational Institutions: Academia collaborates with schools and universities to integrate its digital courses into their curricula. This is achieved through licensing agreements where institutions pay a fee to offer Academia's content to their students.
   • Government Contracts: There is potential for partnerships with government education departments to provide digital learning solutions in regions where traditional educational infrastructure is lacking due to conflict or underdevelopment.

3. Grants and Investment Capital:

   • Grants: Academia actively seeks grants from educational foundations and international development agencies that support educational initiatives in under-served regions.
   • Investment Capital: The start-up phase may be supported by seed funding from venture capitalists who are interested in educational technology. As the platform shows potential for scale and impact, further rounds of funding could be pursued.