Covid-19: How Google is helping in MENA
As COVID-19 continues to spread around the world, we’re taking action in MENA to help people access useful and reliable information in Arabic, to enable productivity of remote workers and students, and to help public health officials and communities in their relief efforts.
Access to useful & reliable information in Arabic
As of today, you will be able to find more information in Arabic about safety and prevention tips and other helpful resources for individuals, educators, and businesses on google.com/covid19.
The microsite is designed to help users access resources easily and quickly. In the “Health Information” section of the site, you will find details about symptoms, prevention, and treatment. In the safety and prevention tips, you will find the most recent content by the World Health Organization (WHO).
The site contains health & prevention tips, and resources for individuals, educators and businesses.
Along with our other features and efforts such as the SOS alerts on Search, Do the Five panels, and the Google Doodles, we hope these will help people find answers to some of the most trending questions we’ve seen on Google Search, namely about Covid-19 symptoms, prevention and where to get tested for the virus.
Enabling productivity of remote students & workers
We launched Teach From Home, a hub in Arabic for tips, training and tools from Google for Education to help remote teachers. For students, we created an all-Arabic educational hub on YouTube, called Dorosi (means lessons), a library of hundreds of classes based on official government curricula in MENA.
We moved our digital skills training, Maharat min Google, to virtual sessions accessible on Meet on G Suite and YouTube. And we’re running live sessions, called Digital Days moderated by MENA’s Google Developer Groups (GDGs) to individuals interested in learning about machine learning, quantum computing and other related topics.
The Teach from Home hub has a range of resources for educators teaching from home.
On the microsite, a section is dedicated to helping businesses stay connected and informed. This includes local resources for remote working & distance learning, and tips to help businesses manage through uncertainty.
Supporting small and medium sized businesses
In addition to the resources, we announced last week $340 million in Google Ads credits available to all SMBs globally with active accounts over the past year, including in the Middle East and North Africa region. Credit notifications will appear in their Google Ads accounts and can be used at any point until the end of 2020 across its advertising platforms. We hope it will help alleviate some of the cost of staying in touch with their customers.
Supporting relief efforts & communities in MENA
Earlier this month, Google launched Community Mobility Reports which show movement trends over time among communities based on anonymised aggregated data to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating covid-19. The report includes many countries in the Middle East and North Africa, such as the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and more.
We also pledged a sum of US$250 million in Google Ad Grants to help more than 100 government agencies around the world run public service announcements and health and safety awareness campaigns. The Ad Grants are being rolled out in MENA.
We will continue to update our blog with our efforts to help combat COVID-19 in MENA and to mitigate the impact on users and partners, and for Arabic speakers everywhere.
