Connected Learning Hubs — Offline-First E-Learning for Refugee and Host-Community Youth in Jordan

Starting in 2018, UNHCR's Connected Education team partnered with the nonprofit Learning Equality, with funding from Google.org, to bring the offline-first Kolibri e-learning platform to Jordan, where much of the refugee population lacks reliable internet access.

The partnership built a network of 10 Connected Learning Hubs across Amman, Jordan's northern and southern governorates, and the Zaatari and Azraq refugee camps. Three of the ten hubs sit inside the camps themselves — two in Zaatari's Sector 2 and Sector 6, and one in Azraq's Village 2 — implemented on the ground by Save the Children, while JOHUD, CARE and Blumont/IRD run the community-centre hubs elsewhere in the country. Kolibri lets students aged 13 to 17, both refugees and Jordanian host-community youth, access mathematics, Arabic, English, science and general-knowledge content, complete comprehension exercises and have their progress tracked, all without a live internet connection — content is loaded locally and synced when connectivity is available. When COVID-19 closed the physical hubs, the partnership adapted by moving offline servers online, funding paid internet data bundles for students, and producing Arabic-language pedagogical and technical guides so families could continue using Kolibri at home.

The programme's reach is real but modest at national scale: ten hubs collectively serve a small fraction of the roughly 650,000-plus registered Syrian refugees in Jordan, and neither UNHCR nor Learning Equality has published a rigorous, independent evaluation of learning outcomes — the available evidence is descriptive, documenting implementation and adaptation rather than measured achievement gains.