Language access services for refugees worldwide.
Twilio, Y Combinator, Fast Forward Accelerator, Echoing Green, DRK fellowships, AWS, Atlassian, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Prism Charity Fund, Full Circle Fund, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, BlackRock, Emerson Collective, Draper Richard Kaplan Foundation, IOM, IRC, World Relief, Catholic charities and MIT Solve.
There are 30 million refugees worldwide, and 44% can't understand the information they're given or communicate with people trying to help them, whether they are in camps, in processing, or resettling in host countries. Most refugees fall below the poverty line and have little access to basic necessities and social services. Language barriers acutely harm refugees by restricting access, efficiency, quality, and scale of humanitarian support across EVERY social sector - medical, legal/asylum, education, coordination, resettlement, trauma, employment, casework, housing, food, etc. This leads to denials of service, critical errors, and increased exposure risk to threats, abuse, and isolation. Therefore solving it has the potential for widespread social impact which will help refugees resettle and return to normalcy. NGOs have limited language support because of high costs associated with hiring translators and erratic funding.
Tarjimly merges two core solutions: community and technology. Their community solution activates the world's 3 billion bilinguals, mostly from diaspora communities, to volunteer as on-demand translators for the 30 million refugees in crisis. Their technology solution delivers interpretation and translation in 80+ languages using efficient ML matching of volunteers to refugees, which lowers commitments, limits attrition, and raises the certainty of high impact and optimal fit. Beneficiaries can live chat, conference call, integrate with zoom, submit documents, filter by gender, dialect, unique expertise and more.
Tarjimly provides an accessible solution allowing beneficiaries to not be left behind in case of crisis. Refugees also have access to short videos and IEC materials from which they can learn to use the Tarjimly mobile app independently.
Tarjimly plans to extend to Qatar, Mexico, Panama, and UAE. They are currently piloting a project with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Qatar office. Upon successful completion of this pilot, they expect to enter a multi-year agreement with IOM offices in Qatar, UAE, and other IOM country offices of the Middle East. Similarly, they are in negotiation to sign contracts with UNHCR country offices for Mexico and Panama. Furthermore, they have had initial outreach with organizations in Poland, Romania and the United Kingdom to expand services to Ukrainian refugees.