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Project summary
Children are being introduced to AI in classrooms. Educators are receiving AI training from their ministries. Employees are being upskilled by their companies. The AI literacy wave is reaching every group in society except the people who children go home to every night.
The harms are already here, and it shows up in children forming emotional dependencies with AI companions, using chatbots to bypass their own learning, sharing sensitive family data with AI systems that store everything, and turning to AI for medical advice instead of doctors. 70% of children are already using AI chatbots regularly. Only 37% of parents are even aware that this is happening. (Common Sense Media 2025)
Parents are not unintelligent or uninvested; they are simply operating without the tools, language, or frameworks to navigate a technology that changes every few months. And in the UAE, Federal Decree-Law No. 26 now holds parents legally accountable for their children's digital safety, with no localised platform available to help them meet that obligation.
We're addressing this directly by working on a parent-facing AI literacy platform — the first in the MENA region — that builds parental instincts through scenario-based learning, measures knowledge gaps before and after, and generates cohort reports that schools and governments can use for compliance and policy. One person built it in Dubai because it didn't exist. This grant funds the first pilot that proves it works.
There is a measurement problem at the heart of family AI safety. We talk about parent awareness, but nobody has actually tested it - especially in the MENA region - with a standardised methodology that tracks what parents know before and after a structured intervention (AI Safety Literacy here).
That's what i am building at JEEL AI in it's first ver.
The platform is live and working. Parents will work through five scenario-based modules: emotional AI dependency, deepfakes, academic integrity, data oversharing, AI health misinformation, and complete a pre/post assessment that measures what I call the Confidence-Knowledge Gap: the pattern where parents who feel most confident about AI safety are often the ones making the riskiest decisions when tested. It's the most dangerous failure mode in family AI safety, and it's almost entirely undocumented.
The goal of this grant is to change that. Within 90 days: one UAE school/institute onboarded, 30+ parents completing the full intro programme, pre/post data collected, cohort report published. The first real dataset on family AI literacy in the MENA region, generated through a platform that's already built and waiting.
The fund will be mostly used to pay for the tech stack and miscellaneous expenses. to run the pilot and work on partnership proposals, etc.
Vercel Pro — 12 months costing $240. Supabase Pro — 12 months costing $300. OpenAI & Claude API costs for pilot $400. Miscellaneous will cost $1,060 (partnership outreach, materials, travel, etc.).
It's just me. Fatma Egal, the Dubai-based founder and the person who built everything you'd find at the Jeel AI app pilot ver.1 . Containing five scenario modules, a pre/post assessment engine, a multi-organisation admin dashboard with cohort reporting, and the underlying database architecture. All of it in Next.js and Supabase.
My background is in STEM biology studies, and I pivoted to Machine learning with a scholarship at Women In AI by Abdullah Al Ghurair Foundation. Core team member at AI Safety UAE, BlueDot AI/AGI Strategy graduate (December 2025). I've spent the last couple of months surveying 45+ UAE parents and educators, running AI safety community events for families, and iterating on the product based on what I actually heard from them.
Currently a Judge for Safe AI Cup 2026 as a startup founder for JEEL AI.
The most plausible failure is an entity partnership pipeline problem. The platform is ready, but I might not be able to convert interested schools/institutions/companies into committed pilots fast enough within the grant window. This is a sales and relationship problem, not a product problem, honestly. But I have warm conversations with several UAE Gov institutions like (Emirates Global Aluminium, Emirates Safer Internet Society, etc.) already; the risk is timing, really, not fit.
The second failure mode is low parent completion rates. The mitigation currently done is the deliberate design decision to keep each scenario session under 8 minutes. Long-form courses don't work for time-constrained UAE parents. This platform was built around that constraint from day one.
If the project fails, I'll document it honestly and share the post-mortem publicly. The infrastructure stays live. The methodology is replicable. Someone else in this space is welcome to learn from whatever went wrong.
Nothing. This is the first funding application I've submitted that I'm genuinely comfortable with. Everything built so far has come out of my own time and pocket.