Thank you.
Honourable Chair, vice-chairs and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to submit a brief and appear on behalf of The Refugee Centre.
Over the past three years, our not-for-profit organization has been engaged with new and innovative ways to tackle integration in Canada. Before our launch in 2015, we studied the landscapes of services available to these populations and decided to contribute in our own way. Our centre operates on three main principles: academic, social and economic integration.
Through our academic integration programs, we were able to admit over 150 refugees into post-secondary educational institutions in our first year alone. We found that many refugees were missing key prerequisites to achieve a higher level of education in Montreal, and that was IELTS and TOEFL prep. As soon as we offered these classes, we were able to achieve the aforementioned numbers.
Aside from our academic solutions, we also decided to put our skills toward developing and creating technological solutions to better integration and immigration as a whole. Our two major technologies are LUNA AI and our pre-arrival services portal.
In 2017 and 2018, we developed an application called LUNA AI to aid refugee claimants by leveraging AI conversational abilities with newcomers through an interactive chatbot. Currently, claimants can chat with LUNA in any language of choice and in turn, LUNA will control the conversation in order to extract information needed from the claimant and then automatically fill out the necessary forms in French or English. This ensures that the claimants are actually filling out the necessary information and are guided towards the correct resources. LUNA's main goals are to potentially save time for refugee claimants, legal representatives and government workers.
We are currently expanding LUNA to aid more than just refugee claimants but all newcomers in many bureaucratic processes including work permit applications, health card and driver's licence applications, and immigration forms from various streams of immigration in Canada. We're aiming for LUNA to add value in terms of data integrity, automation, innovating client service delivery, collecting data trends, and eliminating fraud, as with LUNA we can better track where users are struggling or not understanding certain questions. Furthermore it provides the correct information to users as many newcomers are taken advantage of and given incorrect information as they are not aware of their legal rights nor their obligations to Canada throughout the immigration process. LUNA would therefore potentially limit the effect of crooked immigration practices throughout the country.
Our second technology that's currently being developed is our pre-arrival services portal. From our research we noticed that immigrants and sponsored refugees have anywhere between 12 and 24 months to prepare for arrival to Canada. Therefore, we've created a social network portal geared to immigrants, refugees and prospective newcomers. This web application aims to help newcomers transition into their new life in Canada before they even arrive. We aim to centralize all the services available for newcomers in one place for easy access and also to create a space where newcomers can interconnect and help one another. A user can create a profile, join communities that they're interested in, and also register for services that will be integrated directly into the web application. These services can be either governmental or non-governmental in nature.
The application will then gather data about the user and their time spent on the application. This will include tracking questions they need the most help with and the services they find the most helpful. The data will then be used to provide immigrants better choices and suggested services thus creating a proof and methodology for integration based on the data we've gathered.
We hope to also locate services that are either being underutilized, over-utilized or no longer needed. Some key advantages or examples of the services will be the ability for them to understand what services will be available to them before they even land in Canada. Newcomers can prepare in advance for their housing situation, what schools are like, what the registration process is, and the average cost associated with their city of choice. They'll have onboarding guidance for what to expect in terms of work, labour and entrepreneurial standards, as well as financial literacy education, enabling them to know which banks better suit their financial situation and how our banking system works. In our experience dealing with newcomers, there are many services and tasks they could have done before entering Canada that would have prepared them better in terms of integration.
Last, we would like to shed light on our tech education programs through our social innovation catalyst called DevBloc. DevBloc acts as a technology and entrepreneurial lab to aid newcomers in tech education and building their own businesses alongside Canadians. In order to prepare the incoming refugee and immigrant population in Canada for the booming tech economy, we started a programming school. This programming school educates refugees and Canadians on the most in-demand coding languages available in industry today. Alongside our partners in industry, we give these workshops throughout the week. Towards the end, the teams and the classes build their own programs to either expand their own start-ups or expand their profile in industry.
Alongside DevBloc, we also host an annual hackathon where we team up with different organizations to tackle social issues. This past year, we teamed up with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada where the IRCC presented us with three challenges. We're happy to say that we solved all three technological challenges in just 24 hours, proving what the impact of collaboration between grassroots organizations such as ours and government can really do.
This brings us to our three recommendations.
One is for government to work more closely with grassroots organizations to improve client delivery services to newcomers. These organizations deal with the concerns more directly.
Two is to take advantage of the technological advances today to better deliver these services and track their effectiveness on the incoming population.
Three is to prepare newcomers for the upcoming economy. While the current trends are promising, it is a safer and stronger bet to tap into the entrepreneurial spirit of these newcomers. This can be done by investing in incubators and technology labs geared toward newcomers such as ours.
Thank you very much. I look forward to any questions, hopefully.