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Good practice Imported

Mahara-Tech — Egypt's National Free AI Literacy Platform for the Arabic-Speaking World

Egypt · Cairo · See the Egypt profile · See the Cairo profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 28% 60/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Egypt's ITI runs Mahara-Tech, a free Arabic AI and digital-skills platform with an AI career-advisor chatbot and mentored AI Academy tracks. UNESCO's 2025 King Hamad Prize credits it with 600,000+ users and nearly 2 million completed learning journeys.

600,000+ users
Platform users (as of 2025 recognition)
~2,000,000 learning journeys
Completed learning journeys (as of 2025 recognition)
30,000+ software engineers, CS graduates and students
Trainees targeted by AI/ML Capacity Building Programme (n/a)
86 entries (4 laureates, 50+ countries)
UNESCO King Hamad Prize entries considered (2025)
Mahara-Tech — Egypt's National Free AI Literacy Platform for the Arabic-Speaking World

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Information Technology Institute (ITI), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology
Period
Ongoing; AI Academy track recognized 2025
Keywords
AI literacy, digital skills, workforce development

Context

Mahara-Tech is Egypt's national digital-education platform, run by the Information Technology Institute (ITI) under the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. Launched to close two gaps — the scarcity of Arabic-language technical content and the region's growing digital-skills shortage — it offers free courses in AI, machine learning, cybersecurity and other IT fields to learners across the Arabic-speaking world.

Activities

Its AI Academy track runs two learning models: an unlimited self-paced online path and a smaller mentored track with weekly sessions led by AI Master Trainers. The platform includes an AI-Powered Career Advisor chatbot (built on Aitar.ai) and, with Google, a three-level Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Capacity Building Programme aiming to train over 30,000 software engineers, computer-science graduates and students in NLP, computer vision and predictive analytics.

Results

In 2025, Mahara-Tech was named one of four laureates of the UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for the Use of ICTs in Education, selected from 86 entries across more than 50 countries, crediting the platform with over 600,000 users and nearly 2 million completed learning journeys. UNESCO's laureate citation notes that fairness, transparency, accountability and privacy principles are integrated throughout the content.

Conclusions

These are platform-reported reach figures; no independent third-party study of learning outcomes (skills gained, job placement) has been published.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k) — No public budget figures were found; the platform is operated by a government institute (ITI/MCIT), supplemented by a corporate partnership with Google.
Time to results
Long (> 3 years) — Platform ongoing since before 2025; the AI Academy track and Google partnership were recognised by UNESCO in 2025.
Staffing & skills
Information Technology Institute (ITI), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (Egypt), AI Master Trainers (mentored track), Google (AI/ML Capacity Building Programme partner)

Conditions for success

  • Free, Arabic-language content to lower the access barrier across the Arabic-speaking world.
  • Two parallel learning models (self-paced and mentored) to serve different learner needs.
  • A named capacity-building partnership (with Google) to reach a specific, sizeable trainee target.

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

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