AMMAN — “There is a tendency to focus on young
people as being the future, but they are also the present,” Kristin Lord, CEO
and president of IREX, told
Jordan News in an interview during her visit
to Amman.
اضافة اعلان
“Young people have the capability to contribute and
lead right now.”
IREX is a nonprofit organization that focuses on
youth empowerment, leadership, and expanding education and information access
globally through effective institutions.
Originally, IREX focused largely on the former
Soviet Union to foster exchange, research, and youth investment through mutual
understanding between the Soviet Union and the US.
In the early 1990s, IREX’s work shifted to helping
“newly emergent societies” through supporting independent media, youth, and
education reform.
Currently, IREX works in more than 100 countries,
including Jordan.
Throughout her career, from being a dean at George
Washington University to acting president at the US Institute of Peace, Lord
has always worked with youth. After joining IREX in 2014, the topic of youth
came even more to the forefront.
“We have the largest youth population in human
history,” she said. “Here in Jordan, almost two-thirds of the country is under
the age of 30.”
Youth populations globally have been on the rise.
Data by the Switzerland-based World Economic Forum shows that across Africa
today, more than 60 percent of the population is below the age of 25, In India,
10–24-year olds make up 365 million of the total population, and in Egypt, more
than half of the labor force is younger than 30.
“You look globally, regionally, and even locally in
Jordan, at the size of the youth population, and you think ‘the path that these
young people take is going to tip the balance on issues that are going to
affect the entire world for decades, if not longer, so why are we not
prioritizing investing in these young people?’.”
The growing youth populations, however, are facing
their own sets of challenges: unemployment, illiteracy, lack of education,
migration, climate change, and global unrest.
“Having large
youth populations is usually a sign of great opportunity — young people are
creative and can spur economic growth,” said Lord. “But the risk side is that if
they are not properly engaged and not properly given those paths (to grow), it
can cause a fair amount of turmoil.”
“Young people need to be invested in, and given
paths to be able to step up to the role,” she added. And at IREX, “we really
want to be able to create these opportunities.”
‘Leaders on their own’
IREX programs in Jordan
include Families in The Digital Age, Fulbright Teaching Excellence, and
Achievement, Learn to Discern Media Literacy Training, and implementing
Prestige for USAID.
These programs focus largely on teacher and youth
empowerment, digital literacy, cultural exchange, and community engagement.
Through investing in youth after the end of the
programs and ensuring they have the leadership skills necessary to succeed
regardless of location, “youth are equipped — or as equipped as they can be —
to lead community outreach,” said Lord.
“Often we see that when youth are given opportunity
… they become leaders on their own and develop new initiatives without any help
from us.”
According to Lord, the recipe for achieving
large-scale impact through community engagement is: investment in youth and
youth programs, exposure to productive and educational experiences such as
volunteer work and civic engagement, and finally, generating pathways to
leadership.
In Jordan, IREX will soon be implementing a new
young leaders’ exchange program where “60 young leaders a year will come to
spend some time in the US as part of their leadership development,” said Lord.
Youth unemployment
remains a battle
Globally, the number of
unemployed youths is set to hit 73 million in 2022. In Jordan, the youth
unemployment rate sits somewhere between 40 to 50 percent, with recent
statements from the former president of the Royal Court Economic Department,
Mohammed Al-Rawashdeh, putting it at the 50 percent mark.
Jordan, said Lord, is not a country where youth
completely lack education (statista.com puts Jordan’s literacy rate at around
97 percent). “There is a bit of a mismatch between youth preparation and job availability,”
she added.
Job skills can also play a role in youth
unemployment.
“Having an academic degree does not mean that you
are necessarily showing up ready to come into an office.”
To help combat the skills gap, IREX conducts their
Youth Essential Skills, or YES, curriculum to teach youth time management and
critical thinking skills, empathy, and “other skills that teach you how to
interact in a workplace”.
“Soft skills are so important because they allow
young students to be agile and adapt, and part of our curriculum is learning
how to learn,” Lord said.
“We want people to be agile and adaptable because
the world is changing really fast, and none of us are good predictors about
where jobs will be or what skills people will need. … Soft skills are what can
help carry us through and make that transition.”
“This is where IREX wants to invest in people.”
But it is not just about the skills matching, “we
really need to see job creation,” said Lord.
Lasting impacts of
COVID-19 on youth
The latest data from UNICEF
shows that, globally, at least one in seven children has been directly affected
by COVID-19 lockdowns, and more than 1.6 billion children have suffered some
loss of education.
“Media attention was largely on how COVID affected
older people, and that is because they were much more likely to be hospitalized
or even die because of COVID, but the fact of the matter is it was young people
who suffered the most profound lasting effects of COVID,” said Lord. “Not just
to young people’s health, but to their entire lives.”
While IREX was able to continue its programs using a
blended learning model, Lord emphasized that the focus is now addressing the
learning crisis, working on youth employment, and amping up civic engagement
amongst youth.
“We lost a lot during COVID, but young people are
still facing the consequences,” she said.
In Jordan, IREX transferred its training curricula
online by building a learning management system.
The rise of digital platforms to accommodate
lockdowns and new learning models brings the focus to disinformation and
misinformation.
In the first three months of 2020, nearly 6,000
people around the globe were hospitalized due to coronavirus misinformation,
according to recent studies. At the same period, researchers have said that at
least 800 people may have died due to COVID-19-related misinformation.
“All of us are at risk of falling victim to
misinformation or disinformation,” said Lord.
While mis/disinformation is not new, what has
changed is how easy it is to share information right now via social media. “Our
brain is wired to trust information more from someone who is close to us,” said
Lord.
“Social media algorithms are wired to prioritize
engagement. That is the business model. … So, we are primed to share things that
get an emotional reaction,” whether anger, fear, sadness, or happiness.
“This mis/disinformation is not about people being
dumb or uninformed, but how social media takes advantage of our brains. This is
why we need to give people the skills to recognize how they are being …
manipulated.”
IREX runs various programs to tackle mis/disinformation, one
of which is “Learn to Discern”. The programs focus largely on fact-checking,
recognizing emotional manipulation, empathy, and tolerance.
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