By Richard Rowe | Chair and CEO, Open Learning Exchange.
Global Giving's Syrian Refugee Relief Fund has given $25,000 to the Tiger Girls program to support the training of 12 Syrian women coaches, provide 250 digital tablets, and allow 1,200 Tiger Girls to participate in team-based learning and quality education in the Zaatari Refugee Camp near the Syrian border in northwest Jordan.
The Zaatari camp contains between 80,000 and 120,000 refugees. At least 10,000 of them are adolescent girls who have recently been uprooted from their homes and are now living in a temporary and unstable environment. This Program will be designed to give a limited number of these girls a greater sense of personal agency, meaning and connection in their lives. The Program will provide evidence of its effectiveness that could be used to expand this approach to all of the adolescent girls living in similar conditions in Zaatari and elsewhere.
OLE is training Syrian women to be coaches of Tiger Teams of 10-12 adolescent girls who will meet on a regular basis to help each other achieve their goals for improving their literacy, numeracy and social skills. Each Tiger Team will plan and carry out one or more community projects designed to improve life in the camp, especially for the children who are living there.
A key component of OLE’s innovative approach to learning is its low cost and portable Open Learning Kit. The Kit’s Basic e-Learning Library (BeLL) provides access to a wealth of multimedia learning resources. Library members use 10” color tablets,using a Wi-Fi router, to access the low-cost Raspberry Pi server containing thousands of free books, videos and audio materials. A video camera, projector and laptop are included supporting group meetings and the creation of local materials.
The global giving grant will enable OLE to develop additional Arabic content designed to increase the skills of the Syrian women coaches and the knowledge, skills and values of the Tiger Girls as well as expand significantly the number of reading tablets the girls will be able to use as they climb their own personal learning ladders.
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