"Remote work is the future of work." — Alexis Ohanian, Reddit
The problem
Nearly
10 years after the Syrian
war, Lebanon continues to host the largest number of refugees
per capita in the world. Multiple crises since 2020 have further
impacted the already limited job market for refugees. According to
Humans Rights Watch, the Lebanese Pound has lost 80% of its value
since 2019, eroding people’s ability to access basics like food,
shelter, and healthcare.
An ILO assessment of Syrian refugee employment in Lebanon finds that low wages, high unemployment and lack of labour market regulation pose serious challenges to livelihoods for both residents and refugees in host communities.
Our solution at Techfugees Lebanon:
Techfugees
Lebanon considers remote work as a stepping stone to financial
independence. Microwork especially is an opportunity accessible to any
displaced person regardless of their level of digital skills and
lowers the “barriers to entry” to digital work. We were able
with no direct funding to train 25 refugees in Bekaa, Beirut and
Tripoli, in partnership with local computer labs. We now need funds
to scale and sustain this program.
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👉🏾 Read more about their project in this article.
Our champion project for 2021: Humans in the loop
In 2021, we partnered with Humans in the Loop, one of the finalist #tech4refugees projects in our Global Challenges in 2018, to join forces and bring tech employment to refugees in Lebanon. After a successful pilot on remote work with 25 persons in Beirut, Bekaa and Tripoli, we aim at giving more work opportunities.
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Human in the Loop is a social enterprise which employs and trains refugees to provide image annotation services to computer vision companies. It is a niche market that currently requires manual human input in order to train ML models to recognize images in a way that a human would, and Human in the Loop is part of a growing community of “impact sourcing” enterprises that is dedicated to providing employment to vulnerable groups in this sector. The opportunity they are seizing is that image annotation is a very accessible type of labor that does not require previous education or professional skills, but which can open the door to more advanced tech jobs and freelancing skills, which are especially useful for migrants. In this way, they are empowering refugees to earn a living in a dignified way and gain skills, and they are turning them in “digital nomads” who are able to make use of the opportunities that remote digital work provides to people who are on the move. Human in the Loop works as an outsourcing business with B2B sales. Their clients are companies from the computer vision, self-driving cars, drones, and satellite imager industry, which are training machine learning models.
👉🏾 Read more about our partnership in this article.
The learnings from our collaboration with Humans in the loop will help us share the word with other educational content partners providing access to employment opportunities and financial inclusion through our volunteer Chapters network.
Now we have the content, we need funds to pay the trainees !
Where your donations will go:
The funds collected will help:
-
Organize professional trainings for refugees in Lebanon (4000€)
- Training the refugees/displaced people on data labeling skills with HITL, the fund will be used to pay for the trainers and also for daily transportation for the trainees if the training center is far from the camp community.
- Training the refugees/displaced people on remote work soft skills by having professional trainer from upwork or other remote work platform, the fund will be used to hire trainer.
- Pay for logistics rent (venue , internet , laptops ) related for chapter events/activities in case we couldn't have free host/facilities.
- Research and publish a report to list existing solutions and best practices to access remote work and financial inclusion or refugees and asylum seekers in Lebanon (2500€ NEEDED)
- Support the technical development of Basefugees (2500€ NEEDED)
👉🏾 10% of the funds collected will be donated to the Humans in the Loop team (MIN. 1000€).
Who we are ?
