Aline Sara

Aline Sara is the co-founder and CEO of NaTakallam, an award-winning social enterprise that works with displaced and conflict-affected communities to hire individuals as online tutors, teachers, and translators. With a background in journalism and human rights, Aline is working to disrupt traditional models of humanitarian aid by leveraging the digital economy to promote sustainable solutions to forced migration.

Under Aline’s leadership, NaTakallam has distributed $4.5 million in self-earned income to conflict-affected populations by connecting them to +37,000 learners and hundreds of organizational clients worldwide. Aline is a Cartier Women’s Initiative, Summit, and Halcyon fellow. She has been a speaker at numerous high-level events, including TechCrunch Berlin and several OECD, UN, and World Bank conferences. She was named ‘2025 Social Entrepreneur of the Year’ by the Schwab Foundation, ‘Woman Entrepreneur of the Year’ at the Elle Impact Awards, winner of the World Bank Youth Summit, and is a 2024 MIT Solver. Aline is a passionate advocate for human and women’s rights and intercultural exchange.

Lebanese, born and raised in New York, Aline completed her Baccalaureate at the Lycée Français in New York City and graduated with a degree in Psychology from Tufts University in Boston. She then moved to Beirut and worked in conflict resolution and human rights before transitioning into journalism, focusing on human and women’s rights and wider socio-political affairs before, during, and after the Arab Uprisings. In 2012, Aline returned to New York for her master’s in international affairs at Columbia University. She then worked as an international election observer in Tunisia, Guyana, and Haiti while continuing to write as a freelancer.

In 2015, in light of the challenging work situation for the million+ Syrian refugees in Lebanon, and while searching for ways to practice her own Arabic skills, Aline came up with the idea for NaTakallam – to hire refugees as online tutors – which has grown into a larger social enterprise working in multiple languages and communities. Besides income to refugees on the one hand and a service to students and clients on the other, NaTakallam helps foster intercultural exchange and raise awareness around the daily challenges of fleeing conflict zones, notably through its academic partnerships with schools and universities (including Columbia, Duke, GW, Tufts, Yale and more).