Little Thinking Minds: Edtech in MENA
Faced with the lack of educational content for kids in Arabic, Rama Kayyali took matters into her own hands.
Biography:
Rama Kayyali is the co-founder and CEO of Little Thinking Minds, a MENA based edtech.
LTM provides the region’s schools with Arabic language learning and reading content, on various topics. The company was founded in 2004 and serves 800 schools. Its content is consumed by over 400,000 students.
The absence of Arabic kids content led you to start the company. What were the causes for that absence?
Parents who were interested and had the means to engage their children in educational content often chose English products, as they assumed their children were already exposed to Arabic day-to-day. Arabic wasn’t viewed as useful, whereas English was the language of opportunity.
On a more prosaic level, pre-internet distribution of kids content was difficult regionally. Arabic dialects differ, books are expensive to produce, trade (shipping and customs) across countries is tortuous… the incentives weren’t right.
I ran into this problem after giving birth to my first son. All of the engaging, educational kids audio visual content (ie: Baby Einstein) was in English. There were no similar options in Arabic. My background was in film/video production and my co-founder, who has a similar background, ran into the same problem. That’s how Little Thinking Minds was born.
You touched upon dialects. Can you explain the difference between spoken and written Arabic?
Arabic is a diglossic language, meaning its written form differs from its spoken form. There is only 60% overlap between spoken and written Arabic. There are 22 countries in the Arab world and 22 accents, some close, some totally different.
Throughout the region, kids learn Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in school, but speak in dialect at home. A Tunisian and a Jordanian have a hard time understanding each other if they speak in their local dialects, but they would if they used MSA.
All of our content is in MSA, as we are focusing on children being proficient readers and writers. This allows our content to transcend borders and reach the entire region. We might explore dialectic content in the future. AI gives us more tools to do so.
Why is it important for the region’s kids to speak Arabic?