Nafez Al Dakkak – LINC 2016 Conference Speaker
Nafez Al Dakkak is a the founding director of Edraak.org, an online education effort of the Queen Rania Foundation aiming to provide free high quality online and blended education to Arabic speakers across the region. Edraak is the first Arabic instance of the OpenEdx platform developed by Harvard and MIT. Today, Edraak reaches almost half a million registered Arabic-speaking learners across the region. Edraak’s learners come from all across the region and include disadvantaged youth in Gaza, Syria, and Iraq.
Previously, Nafez was a strategy consultant with PwC’s Education Practice working with different governments across the GCC, focusing on education to employment transitions. Nafez is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shaper community (attending the Global Agenda Council Meeting in Dubai in 2012 and the Annual Summit in Davos in 2013 and 2015). Nafez writes on education reform and technology regularly on in Arabic and English publications. While at Yale he completed a yearlong, award winning, thesis on the Obstacles towards Curriculum Reform in the Middle East, using Jordan and the UAE as case studies, of which the Dubai School of Government published an executive. He recently completed a 6 week fellowship with New America in Washington D.C. working on the crossroads of Islamic education and Arab identity after the 2011 revolutions.
