Bringing online work to refugee women in Lebanon

Beirut, LebanonTaQadam

$730

Raised of $3,000 USD

Fundraising ended on May 07, 2018
6 supporters
24%%

About This Project

In 2013, a 13-year old girl Fatima fled Aleppo, the bleeding heart of the Syrian Civil War. Today she epitomizes a contradiction. Despite unspeakable violence and the loss of beloved ones in her war-torn homeland, her unbreakable human spirit remains hopeful and resilient against all crushing odds. She studies Physics at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and dreams of making an impact in the world.

However, Fatima cannot find work in Lebanon to sustain herself and her family, and she does not qualify for any support of humanitarian programs – which target only refugees in camps. This is a blow to her dignity making her even more vulnerable and undermining her dreams.

6 months ago, we created TaQadam, “Progress” in Arabic, as a solution to break the cycle of poverty and provide a sustainable change for young refugee women in the Middle-East, giving them the opportunity to earn a life-changing income.

TaQadam is a mobile platform aimed at providing ambitious young refugees in need of paid work, a work opportunity in an innovative tech market. At TaQadam, we train talented refugees, youth and women on image data annotation to become “data trainers” for Artificial Intelligence.

You can follow our journey on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Youtube!




In a key stage of our development we need your support to invest in the testing and delivery of the first contracts to provide a living proof that our teams and other talented, educated refugees can conduct professional, hi-tech work.

We aim to offer this service for companies that work on Artificial Intelligence algorithms or websites looking to enhance search results for their users. It is an incredibly high potential market during an era of massive data volumes generated daily, globally.

Focusing on Lebanon-based refugees. Our current focus is on Syrian and Palestinian refugees based in Lebanon as well as on vulnerable Lebanese youth. Indeed, thousands of Syrian and Palestinian refugees fled to Lebanon and the economy simply cannot absorb this population by providing them with sustainable work opportunities.

How You Can Help

  • Donate to the TaQadam project on StartSomeGood :)
  • Share our StartSomeGood page with your friends on Social Media and by email!
  • Visit our website taqadam.io to find out more
  • Share the project with your friends and relatives!

Use Of Funds

$3,000 Tipping Point Goal

In order to build credentials and empower refugees, we need to invest and run pilot projects

  • Run first pilot to prove the concept to potential clients and local government – $3 000

Our project met interest from large companies and we found potential first early adopters for our service. However, our prospects require proof that talented, educated people from our data trainers pool can conduct professional, hi-tech work so that large companies can trust us with their business needs.

In order to make this proof of concept, we need to run a pilot with first 30 000 test images for 6 prospects. This pilot will be free for our prospects for them to agree to invest in us their time and trust with real data examples, helping us build a learning curve.

However, we believe it will be fair and impactful to pay our pool of trainers for this first task from the beginning. This would allow us to :

1) Recruit necessary talents: many digital literacy trainings performed by NGOs in this region did not bring any work opportunity. Therefore, the population is more skeptical and more reluctant to join this kind of initiatives. By paying our pool of trainers, we have much higher chances to attract the required number of talented people and create a positive precedent to attract more talents in the future.

2) Convince local governments that we are capable of creating an immediate economic impact and, therefore, facilitate our development in the region.

This is instrumental in spreading the belief that their online intellectual services can be valuable and gratifying and be a source of income and empowerment. It will help us obtain the support of local government and win first contracts with large western companies.

$5,000 Stretch Goal

  • Investment in technical platform improvements – $5 000

Our mobile platform beta version was launched in February 2018 but still requires further enhancements in task management algorithms, data consolidation and export improvements as well as additional features on the user interface allowing faster and better-quality work (zoom and data entry simplification).

Join us on this journey to create a better future for thousands of refugees, vulnerable youth and women across the globe!

Contribute to turning our platform into a successful engine of empowerment.

Help talented refugees on their journey towards a bright future ahead.

We would love to have you on board!


Latest News

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Rewards

Select Reward
ALLY
$10.00

Dear ally, thank you for your contribution! Your name will be on our website and social media as a person who helped this project to happen!

Unlimited

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FRIEND
$50.00

Dear Friend, thank you for your generosity! We will send you an « insider » monthly newsletter on Taqadam progress during the next 6 months with testimonials from Taqadam data trainers pool - refugees, vulnerable youth and women in Lebanon.

Unlimited

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AMBASSADOR
$100.00

Dear Ambassador, we can't thank you enough for your support! We will send you a postcard from Lebanon signed by Taqadam data trainers pool - refugees, vulnerable youth and women - to leave a tangible trace of your contribution to this project!

Unlimited

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ENTERPRISE ANGEL
$500.00

Dear Angel, your donation is exceptional and extremely valuable to us! In addition to the rewards above, we will offer you image annotation service pro-rata donated amount with exclusive $6 per hour rate!

Unlimited