“It’s a challenge for kids to start loving Arabic animations because the content in English cartoons is much more attractive, and it’s hard to shift more attention to what might be somewhat poorer Arabic content. That’s actually how the idea of Marah TV came to us.” Mariam Elhiny, the founder and Managing Director of Marah TV, told us when we met her at AUC’s Venture Lab.
There have been great attempts to preserve a place for the Arabic language in the minds of children by offering educational and entertaining content in Arabic with cartoon channels such as Spacetoon. But when the attention shifted to English channels like Cartoon Network and the Disney channel, more effort had to be put into the content itself, and that’s when Marah TV was created. Marah TV is a YouTube channel dedicated to kids entertainment. It offers educational but also very attractive animations in the Arabic language.
Marah TV is attracting a lot of attention. It has millions of views on Youtube and in 2016, it even caught the attention of entertainment companies like MBC3 for a partnership. They continue to develop and enhance their brand as they applied for AUC’s Venture Lab, a university based incubator and accelerator for startups, for 16 weeks of workshops and training, receiving a 20,000 Egyptian Pound fund.
“We are proud of the technical level we’re on right now, and we want to use the fund for an in house animation team, so we don’t need to outsource,” Elhiny stated about the AUC Venture Lab experience.
There’s no denying that learning and practicing a second language at a young age is beneficial for kids, but when their mother tongue is not fully established and they use it less; that’s when the real problem arises. According to the UNESCO, linguistic diversity is increasingly threatened as a lot of languages are disappearing. One language disappears on average every two weeks, taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage. Although that’s unlikely to happen to the Arabic language, it’s still a scary statistic. Kids hold the future of our language, and what better way to communicate the language to them, than through animations?
“There are a number of Arabic cartoon channels, but the content is not as attractive as the English channels. Content is crucial because English animations are on an impressive technical level and they’re not just educational and boring. English cartoons tell fun stories, they’re colorful and lively and kids watch them, so we can’t expect them to lower their standards if the Arabic content is not as attractive to them. Marah TV focuses on that whilst creating animations because they know that kids will only love and pay attention to content they find fun. They create characters children can relate to and love, and they focus on telling stories through their educational content.
“Our content is not purely educational, it’s entertaining as well. But it’s based on ethical foundations, so that mothers would feel safe letting their kids watch Marah,” added Elhiny.
UNESCO is always highlighting the importance of mother languages as channels for sharing and communicating authentic cultures and knowledge, which are vast reservoirs of wisdom. Practicing our mother language more often, especially with kids, is crucial in an era of mainly English communication.
“My goal was for Arabic to be loved by kids just as much as English. The idea behind Marah came from us loving our language and wanting to change how parents and kids see Arabic content.” Elhiny said about Marah TV.
