From Local Classrooms to Daloa: TutrMePrep Joins the Ivory Coast Reintegration Initiative

One of the core goals of TutrMePrep has always been simple: use education to create independence.

What started as tutoring sessions for classmates grew into digital literacy programs for refugee families and ESL students in Philadelphia. This year, that same mission is expanding globally through a partnership with Les Meilleurs du Monde (LMDM) and a new role on the board supporting their social and economic reintegration initiative in Daloa, Côte d’Ivoire.

What the Daloa Program Does
The Daloa project works with 26 returned migrants who are rebuilding their lives through entrepreneurship.

Participants are currently:

Paired with mentors in their business sector
Completing vocational training
Developing real business plans
At the end of the program, they will present their ventures to a funding jury, and selected projects will receive direct investment and long-term implementation support.

This isn’t a simulation. These are real businesses designed to support real families.

My Role: Education, Technology, and Implementation
As Chair of Education & Technology, my focus is turning the curriculum into something participants can actually use day-to-day.

That includes:

Designing the entrepreneurship and digital training structure
Building the program schedule for the May in-country sessions
Creating a bilingual French/Dioula mobile app that will come pre-installed on participant smartphones
Developing tools for sales tracking, budgeting, and business organization
Helping manage program budgeting and resource flow between partners
The goal is the same model we tested in our digital literacy classes:
teach skills → build systems → make the program run without us.

Why This Matters for TutrMePrep
Every TutrMePrep project has been based on the idea that access alone isn’t enough.

In both our refugee program and our Philadelphia computer classes:

Students started without the ability to send an email or use translation tools
Ended confident communicating across languages and platforms
Daloa is the next step — applying that same education-for-independence model to entrepreneurship.

It’s also a shift from:

teaching individual students → designing programs that entire communities can run themselves.

What’s Next
Over the coming months, we will:

Finalize the education and technology curriculum
Prepare the in-country training sessions
Continue building tools that participants will use after the program ends
This partnership represents something bigger than one initiative.

It shows what TutrMePrep has been building toward from the beginning:

education that scales, adapts to context, and creates long-term autonomy — whether in a local classroom or across the world.