Chapter 8: Transforming Lives: Achieving Literacy, Digital Inclusion, Effective Participation, and Scalability for the Masses: An Ikraa-Based Success Story

This chapter presents a case study and success story showcasing the use of technology-based training to digitally transform 1,000 refugees in Lebanon's Biqaa Valley, from illiterate adults and out-of-school children to become literate and digitally skilled individuals. The project used ikraa online software, on www.ikraa.academy, a self-learning program that enabled target refugee trainees to acquire listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills of Arabic letters, combining letters to form words, words to form sentences, and sentences to form paragraphs achieving reading and writing competencies up to grade 5 in 35 hours. That in addition to acquiring basic skills of using computers and internet. Adults became capable of assuming digital jobs, and children equipped to be reintegrated into the schooling system. The war in Syria has resulted in over 800,000 refugee children being out of school and thousands of adults growing up illiterate. Refugees globally are suffering of similar problem. Remedy of this situation goes beyond the capacity of any classical schooling system or approach. Integration, inclusion, and effective participation of refugees in the receiving countries calls upon an innovative, creative, accelerated, and scalable approach for education as well as digital transformation. This is where this case study comes in. It is one instance of ikraa success stories of proven track record of accelerating building education competencies and achieving inclusion in three countries and for four nationalities. It presents a successful model open for scalability for the masses of illiterate refugees through online schooling and training using ikraa courses and ikraa online academy.