Impact tech building peace
TaQadam started out of my passion for the disruptive social innovation while still at the UN where I focused on private sector development, inclusive business, social entrepreneurship. Social or impact entrepreneurship is often about transforming the social challenge into a business opportunity.
We live during the largest humanitarian crisis in history since the World War II. 5 million people has been displaced because of wars in Syria and Iraq, economies shuttered, dreams broken.
I spent recent months in Lebanon — country that has a highest number of refugee per capita. There I met educated and talented refugee youth living in poverty, but what is more dangerous, loosing a sense of purpose without what we take for granted — dignified work.
Conflicts happen, but yet there is something different about this era. Billions of us connected. As Millennials we join a gig economy, start our own online businesses. Future of work has become a digital space and it has no borders.
But how the refugee with a smart phone is different from the digital nomad in 2018?
We started TaQadam — progress in Arabic — to bring progress instead of a post-conflict limbo. We believe that technological progress should match human progress. Policy making is becoming a hard space to be in , recent immigration policies and growing populism left us speechless and powerless. But thanks to technology — there are ways around it — you just need to innovate a few steps more than any other tech start up.
There is another interesting fact about 2018. We live in the world when the technology is set to disrupt the future of work — globally. It is transformed by a human-machine interaction, robotics and Artificial intelligence.
A person generates 1 GB of data every day and it is the most valuable resource for the business. In the last few years we advanced Artificial Intelligence far more than in decades since it was created. It is becoming mainstream, it is a part of our daily life: Netflix, Facebook, Yelp, Driverless Uber cars. It transforms businesses as part of Industry 4.0 and government agencies — with smart cities and early warning systems. The trick is that for AI to work properly it needs to be trained by humans through a supervised learning for computer vision. In practice — it comes down to tagging stop signs on the traffic video images — something that can be done on the phone. What is more. YouTube lost millions of dollars putting ads on ISIS video. We are only at the beginning AI revolution, our language has too many nuances, and Arabic is the hardest, trust me.
With TaQadam we meet the growing business need for image annotation, offering a combination of tech tools and humans in the loop.
We train image data for companies. We work with companies that develop Artificial Intelligence — Visual AI — Computer vision and which are processing millions of images to build these algorithms. And it’s a huge market: beyond autonomous vehicles, it is aerial imagery — drones and satellites — for agrotech, disaster response, remote asset monitoring, e-commerce, visual research, you name it. It is the fastest growing market in the world, and demand is not matched.
We launched a mobile application TaQadam that allows precise image annotation to deliver on the business need. We also invested a huge deal to deliver on our social mission — thanks to accessibility, gamification and integrated mobile wallet, TaQadam is made possible in the Middle East. Working with us is rewarding and ethical. With gamification we build communities, friends, bridging cultural gaps, and fighting against gender stereotypes. Its a first step in the long journey to build peace and transform post-conflict economies into thriving and growing ones. And it should start with youth.
We recruited youth at risk, displaced and from the host communities, attending numerous public-funded programs on ICT, yet missing on actual work opportunities due to shrinking economy.
And they are excited. They work from home on the phone yet with the fierce enthusiasm and discipline — locking up an affordable price and high quality — our business proposition to clients.
So many companies made official declarations at the Refugee Summit, World Humanitarian Summit, London conference — to support refugees.
What we need more than support is work. It is a time to connect the dots and make the world a better place by sharing an opportunity. So we all progress.
We are now in Peacetech Accelerator supported by Amazon Web Services to launch our product — data exchange API to enable us to serve companies globally in a simple, secure way with the highest quality.
