Amani’s Big Idea
A compilation of visual narratives from the field: #usaidwbg Storytelling Series
Amani Abu Tair is a 25-year-old student and engineer. From the time she was a little girl, Amani showed no interest in dolls or toys and instead wanted to assemble things. When she was 9, she wanted a scooter so she decided to build her own with woods and two wheels she collected. Everyone called her the little inventor.
In her twenties, Amani started designing apps and games. She invented an app to track doctors’ hospital shifts and another to teach kids about nutrition. Driving her inventions was a desire to fix deficiencies she saw in the world around her.
“I see problems around me, and I just wanted to solve these problems.” — Amani
Two years ago, she thought of another invention that could help blind children learn to read more independently. She sought out schools for blind children in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and began to study how the students learned.
She noticed one problem immediately: The machine most children used to learn braille, the written language of the blind, was riddled with difficulties for young learners. Though road-tested, Amani noticed that it was too large for students to carry on their own. Their small hands often struggled with the keys. She also realized that the device was not conductive to independent learning. Children could only use it with a teacher guiding them, and it was too expensive for their parents to buy.
“Because I’m an engineer, and I believe that education is a right for all, I said: ‘I must find a better way.’” — Amani
Amani set out to invent an alternative. Before long, she had a prototype of the Braille FMZ — a small mechanical device that uses voice instruction and mechanical dots that rise and fall to depict the braille alphabet under a child’s fingers.
She began volunteering at the Peace Center for the Blind in East Jerusalem and tested her device. Today she is seeking support to manufacture it at scale. The master’s degree in business administration she is pursuing is meant to help with that. Amani’s determination doesn’t stop with her most recent invention.
“I want to be the most successful social entrepreneur in the whole world. And when you want to measure my success, my success will be how much I can help other people around me.” — Amani
In 2012, USAID provided Amani an intensive training on entrepreneurship and business plan development. A year later, she was one of 30 Palestinian students who, with USAID support, participated in a mini-MBA program at Tel-Aviv University in partnership with the Kellogg School of Management. Additionally, in June 2016, Amani was once of 700 global entrepreneurs chosen to travel to Silicon Valley to seek support for their innovations at the U.S. Government-sponsored Global Entrepreneurship Summit.
Amani is one of 14,000 young people whom USAID has supported through its Youth Entrepreneurship Development Project, which helps Palestinian youth find jobs and develop their own business. The project develops career centers at local universities and helps students with career guidance, technical training and internships. Since 2005, USAID has supported 80,000 youth with internships, training and community involvement.
This blog is part of USAID’s West Bank and Gaza storytelling series. It is a compilation of stories of individuals, families and communities working to improve their societies — towards growth and progress. They are the inspiring stories of people we work with.
Check out more video portraits at USAID’s storytelling hub. Explore more stories from the Middle East. Follow @USAIDWBG @USAIDMiddleEast and @USAID.
About the Author
Sahar Kalifa is a Senior Communications Advisor at the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs. Most recently, she led several PR campaigns for USAID to advance its work globally, including the agency’s first regional communications initiative. Previously, she served as a writer, producer, and creative strategist developing new content for USAID’s storytelling and multimedia platforms focusing on human interest videos and stories from around the world. Prior to that, she served as the Director of Communications for USAID’s Israeli-Palestinian Program.
