JA's RewirED Panel at COP28 Talks Climate Education and Life Skills

December 12, 2023

With climate change and sustainability among the top concerns of global youth, JA hosted a conversation at the COP28 RewirEd Summit about the transformative power of integrating sustainability education with other critical skills.

Together with INJAZ Al-Arab (JA MENA) and Dubai Cares, we convened a panel of experts on education, climate change, and business (including two JA alumni) to discuss the future of work, the additional skills young people need, and how organizations are working toward sustainability.

The panel, moderated by JA alumnus and entrepreneur Nicholas Kee, Co-founder and CEO of Kee Farms, included Don Sedlock, JA Worldwide’s Director of Global Development; Nadia Abdallah, Chief Education Officer at INJAZ Al-Arab JA MENA; Gillian Lisa Hinde, Global Corporate Responsibility Leader at EY; Dr. Kevin Frey, CEO of Generation Unlimited; Omar Khan, Head of Centre for Business Studies & Research, Dubai Chamber; Love Dager, COO & Co-Founder of Hack for Earth, and Ung Företagsamhet (JA Sweden) Alumnus; and Taha Bawa, Co-Founder and CEO of Goodwall.

Read the Panel Transcript

Don Sedlock: Good evening. Welcome. I hope everybody's holding up. It's been a long couple of days, I think for a lot of you. So it is totally my distinguished honor to be here today to introduce this esteemed panel. Today we're going to talk about synergizing sustainability, the transformative power of integrating climate education with life skills. My name is Don Sedlock, and I'm the Director of Global Development for JA worldwide. Today, we have some really exciting panelists, that I'm excited to introduce, two of which are actually alumni of the Junior Achievement program.

We're really excited to be at COP and to present this panel to you guys. I do want to say a word of thanks to Dubai Cares and the RewirED team for doing an incredible job putting this on. Seriously, it's been incredible. You guys have gone well above and beyond.

Let me go ahead and introduce the panel, and then I'll introduce our esteemed moderator. Kind of working in order, we have Love Dager. Love, do you want to raise your hand? Love is Co-founder and COO of Hack for Earth, and also a JA alumnus. Gillian Hinde: Gillian is Global Corporate Responsibility leader for Ernst and Young (EY). Nadia Abdullah: Nadia, do you want to say hello? She is the Chief Education Officer for INJAZ Al-Arab. And, for those of you who may not know, INJAZ Al-Arab is a regional operating center for JA. So that's how instead of calling it Junior Achievement in MENA, it's INJAZ Al-Arab. And then we have Taha Bawa, Co-founder and CEO of Goodwall. And Omar Khan, Head of the Center for Business Studies and Research from the Dubai Chamber. Thank you so much for welcoming us to your great city. And really, truly, a man who needs no introduction after all of his panels today: Kevin Frey from Generation Unlimited, the CEO. Thank you so much. And now, I'd like to turn it over to Nicholas Kee. Nicholas Kee is Co-founder and CEO of Kee Farms, and also a JA alumnus. Welcome all, and thank you so much.

Nicholas Kee: Good evening, everyone. I think, to give context, we're essentially here at a starting point where education is essentially not the same as it used to be. And so, in the face of climate change, we have to look more deeply into the tools and mechanisms in which we can inform not just the public, but the youth who are most vulnerable. And with that said, INJAZ Al-Arab has been leading the way in that matter. Please tell me, how can we start to look at the implications of raising awareness in youth?

Nadia Abdallah: INJAZ Al-Arab is the regional arm in the MENA region for JA Worldwide. We operate in 13 countries in the region, and we reached 1 million Arab youth this past year. We're really happy, excited, encouraged, and proud of what we've been up to. Our educational pillars are financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and workforce readiness. We've discovered the need for change at INJAZ at a regional level and also on a global level. On that note, we are now embarking on an interdisciplinary change where we are embedding climate, education, SDG education, sustainability, and circular economy education within our pillars of financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and workforce readiness. We work on that journey by partnering with content specialists, NGOs, private-sector donors, and educators because educators and youth are really at the core of everything that we do. In addition to that, we've also launched INJAZ Campus. You guys can check that out at INJAZCampus.org. It is our digital platform where we're launching all of our initiatives, all of our programs. We're beginning with our network and hopefully expanding globally. Lastly, we're also working on another project, a digital career guidance platform where we're trying to educate and guide our youth on career options. And we have an entire plan to introduce green jobs to Arab youth. At the end of the day, what INJAZ aims to do is really to create impactful citizens who are also globally aware of major SDG goals, and becoming sustainably oriented Arab youth.

Nicholas Kee: And I like that, at least with INJAZ Al-Arab, pretty much tees up the youth into becoming more aware of the topic of sustainability itself, so that we can prepare them for the green economy. And while we are at least vaguely or abstractly aware of where the next couple of years is going to take us, I think what’s kind of missing for many young people in their education is some of the practicality of how to look at the skills they might need. Omar, I'm wondering if you could kind of tap into that for me. Like, we know that things could be disastrous, potentially, in future. And we know that there's a skills gap. How do we predict and prepare students and youth to attack these problems of the future?

Omar Khan: Thank you, once again, for inviting us to speak here today. I don't think educating the youth is the least of our problems. It's my generation, as the older one, who are educating the youth now, including my own daughters. So, they sit and they tell me about things that I've done wrong, or where I should have been better. The Dubai Chamber has been going on a long journey. We've created the Center for Responsible Business 20 years ago. And we had the goal of educating the capitalists—the businessmen, businesswomen—about the changes in the ecosystem, the issues, the challenges ahead, and areas where they can develop and become more responsible businesses.

One way that we did this was our Green Building Initiative. We became the first LEED Platinum-certified existing building in the airport, because we wanted to prove to the business community that these kinds of steps can be done, they can be incremental. And the center, of course, brings up a lot of points, whether it's in financing, whether it's in logistics, whether it's in transport, whether it's in shipping and construction. We try to bring up a lot of these issues. Because education is not just about putting somebody in a concrete school and telling them what the curriculum is. It's all around: it's change, advances in technology, new innovations, new inventions, that businesspeople also need to be aware of. And what we wanted to do first was educate them, which is what we've done over the past two decades now. Now we feel that the ecosystem is quite enriched, and the momentum is very strong.

We have the government support, we have the consumer demand, we have the next generation ready, but we just have to build that platform or that bridge from the education system straight into the business world. And this is where I think, more than ever now, every entity that we meet, they have to care about sustainability. Even one of the companies we met on their properties, one of the biggest property companies in Abu Dhabi, their CFO is also their Chief Sustainability Officer. So they asked, well, how do you put capitalism and profits and bottom lines in line with sustainability? So again, and we saw companies in Saudi, we saw them in Dubai. Many of them now have this demand, this thirst, and it goes into everything. The practices, the governance, the social part with how you engage and treat your employees, the energy, and everything else.

We have been on this on this mission for two decades now. Where we are now shifting, we feel the momentum is strong, the education level and awareness is high. And the drive, I'm sure the government unlocks, are really helping. Single-use plastic is banned as of January 1, as a first phase. DEWA (Dubai Electricity & Water Authority) announced the use of solar panels up to the capacity that you need for your factories and warehouses. And so now everything is aligned. From our part, we are shifting gears to going towards B2B. And we've seen this before in the digital world, where we have big companies wanting to be agile and quickly adapt internally. It's hard to do. But you have startups that can help them become agile.

This is where we're trying to sort of infuse a lot of the young, talented companies with a lot of innovative thoughts, thinking outside of the box, and infusing them into the mainstream. This is what we're going to be focusing on next year as well. And a big part of it is also not just the Center for Responsible Business, but we are working with the University of Dubai as well, which is owned by the Chamber. And this is another area where, again, we start infusing the talent, the understanding, and then the will of young people to get into this field. And then they have places to go because we have 220,000 companies under our umbrella.

Nicholas Kee: And so as we start by raising awareness in young people, we can also prepare the private sector to find the suitable skills and have them meet them in the middle ground. You are essentially having you attack the problem from their perspective right now. Love, can you tell us more about Hack for Earth?

Love Dager: Hi, I’m Love. I am Co-founder of Hack for Earth. And we are the hackathon for climate change. If you don't know what a hackathon is, it's an innovation competition. We started to raise something we call citizen-driven innovation, which basically means that we can't wait for government authorities or large corporations to help us solve climate change. We have to go to citizens.

How do we enable people to do solutions for climate change? For us, it's all about enablement, and that's where the hackathon comes in. We do this in three steps. We call it “Dream, Hack, Build.” Dream is, obviously, brainstorming, getting people together. We organize online mingles, bringing people together to network in online meetings. We get people together from all over the world. This year, we have 113 countries involved and over 1,200 hackers that are all working on creating solutions.

First, hackers come up with new ideas, they brainstorm, they get together. And then they can join the hackathon, where they start to come up with solutions. We support them with mentors, with resources. We have partner organizations such as JA Worldwide, so thank you so much for inviting us here. And also UNICEF, different UN chapters. We work with PMIEF (Project Management Institute Educational Foundation), as well, as some of you in here might know. We basically enable youth as hackers to get as far as possible with their ideas. I think everyone has all these ideas, but it's all about really making them really happen.

We did this for a couple years. And then we realized that with solutions, well, most people would go back into schools or their jobs after the hackathon. So we started the Build for Earth Acceleration Program, which lasts six months. I would actually call it sort of like a pre-exploration program. Because you have this big gap where there's a lot of funding available for startups and companies that are already up and running across the scale. But we need people with passion and ideas to take the stage. So they participate in Build for six months to get ready to find investors and so on. I think it's all about really getting to the action, getting everyone enabled to do their part for climate change.

Nicholas Kee: Gillian, from your standpoint, you really see it as a unique intersection of understanding where things are, from the holistic standpoint, at EY. You guys have the capability to really understand the nuances of what makes everything work. Within culture, society, and especially the environment. Given the everyday decisions that we have to make, with respect to transport and food, energy, consumables, how can the youth of today maintain the same momentum that Love has proposed? How can you sustain that momentum into looking at things wher they can substantially improve sustainability moving forward?

Gillian Hinde: I think local context is so key. You know, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. It's about local community first. So that when we talk about sustained solutions, it's not about coming into the community and plying what they need, it's actually about learning from that community. So I think that reciprocity is pretty good. We did a survey with JA across multiple generations, and one of the biggest areas was around cost. So “cost and X” is nothing necessarily new, but it emphasizes the point of holding these ecosystems, the role that industry, government, public–private partnerships, and academia play in a much more organized approach.

These ecosystems are fantastic, but they've got to be organized. And organized so that we can help these teenagers, these people to be productive. Help them to scale and help them to actually drive the impact into communities. I think for EY, as an organization, that’s what we are literally trying to do with a number of partners.

The other point is, you know, you see the tremendous economic data from the new sustainable economy. And it's great that we see the strengths, and we may start seeing growth. But again, the message that we've been driving throughout this past week is about getting very deliberate and organized in the most sustainable way to drive that change.

Nicholas Kee: Shifting gears a bit. I don't know if you guys noticed this, but we're trying to attack the problem from many different perspectives. And at the end, I'll highlight in the ways in which they connect. But Kevin, your space is more within the realm of policy. How do we really meet climate education? How do we shift that heavy narrative of policy, and make it more practical, towards climate education, specifically for youth, in the space of climate change, when it is already modeled with this ambiguity?

Dr. Kevin Frey: I think, and probably everybody's picked up, that there are some factors that are starting to move in the direction. Injecting into curriculum green mindsets and thinking in green skills. There's not a real sense quite yet how to do it. But there is some general support that this needs to be embedded within education systems.

Nicholas Kee: Systematically, of course.

Dr. Kevin Frey: Absolutely. And that's when you're talking about curriculum. When we start talking about curriculum, you're talking about years. That is slow-moving change. And we want to do anything we can to short-circuit that. One of the things we're really advocating for is to make sure that, in grade schools, green mindsets and the planet are being embedded into these systems. That it's more than just theoretical knowledge. That is actually about action, that it is about doing. And so that means getting young people and children outside the classroom to take action. That can be as a volunteer. But even if you think about a volunteering project, a young person has to build a team, create an idea, get out and execute in the real world. And it's not going to go perfectly well. You're going to have to pivot and iterate and figure out how to drive the change that they're trying to perform. I think the ball is already rolling on injecting green and planet into education systems. That still may take ten years to roll down the hill. But we want to make sure that it doesn't end up being a theoretical exercise, with a sage on the stage talking theoretically about climate change. And in fact, inverting that classroom thinking outside.

Nicholas Kee: You're absolutely right. And to that point, I don't think climate education will be a long-life thing. Honestly, based on the predictions that IPCC reports, we will probably be having the same conversation. It's inevitable. We have to continually evolve the kind of education staff, we have to continually train adults, as well. As we continue to evolve, and as the earth becomes more dangerous for us. So, Taha, I'd be interested in understanding from your perspective, from your platform—because I've used it actually—how do you prepare the youth of today? How do you envision using your platform to prepare the youth and beyond, and even older folks who might be here, who might be interested in climate change?

Taha Bawa: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me here. Just to reiterate what Kevin said, I don't think we have time to wait for curriculum redesign. We live in a world where industries are created and destroyed in almost the span of years now. And climate change, AI is accelerating that. We, my brother and I, realized from our perspective that we needed to do something to help young people maximize their potential and have a positive impact on society. We started Goodwall because we thought we couldn't change the world ourselves as young people, but if we could create millions of changemakers who had the opportunities we had growing up, and had a bit of exposure to wanting to create change, then that could be a meaningful thing to do.

When it comes to climate, essentially, I'm generalizing grossly here, in the global north, we have a sense of climate paralysis, right? So there's a real fear that there's no outlet for young people. Like, how can I actually move from activism to actor? And in the global south, you know, I spent COVID in northern Kenya, where we see the effects of climate change. And we see conservancies not necessarily being able to lead to lasting effect, lasting impact, because there are no jobs for young people around there. So there, it's about livelihoods. From our perspective, if you want long-lasting change, you need to move from activism to actor. And for that, you need skills, you need inspiration, you need to know what the pathways are to make a dignified livelihood, to make this your job, like it is for us. And so, our approach has been to build a platform that serves, today, two and a half million young people around the world leveraging mobile technology by youth for youth.

The hook is programming that is very concrete alongside tier-one partners like JA, like GenU, like some of the other large corporations—Accenture, UNICEF, SAP—that bring very unique value, their unique voice. And we have a hook for young people. Once they're in, it's really driven by peer-to-peer action and role modeling, particularly for women and girls. If you want a young person in a certain country to participate, he or she needs to see other young people from a similar background seeing success. And that's what we try and drive.

I think my takeaway is that this is definitely not achievable alone. And so, you know, alongside Kevin around a year ago, we were thinking, we need to create a movement. And Generation Unlimited launched Green Rising here at COP, which is essentially bringing together public–private youth partners to drive the largest movement to get young people into skilling, and into the green economy. And it's pretty exciting. I guess we'll speak more about it. But I think the only way we have is through partnerships at a global level, but also at that local community level.

Nicholas Kee: Yeah, I completely agree. In jumping into the climate change space myself, I have found that because the amount of work that needs to be done is so enormous, everything counts. We have been essentially working on everything. And so, in that same vein, I'm assuming that the work that you do, Taha, relates to the work that Kevin does in a dynamic sense.

Dr. Kevin Frey: That's why it's reciprocated. You know, if I may, Goodwall wouldn't be able to be serving young people in Burundi today if not for UNICEF. It just wouldn't happen. A lot of our work in Sub-Saharan Africa is only possible because of partnerships like GenU. And the same applies elsewhere. We're only able to work on a global pitch competition because of Junior Achievement. You know, we just launched an equal partnership program in Rwanda this weekend thanks to the Ministry of Youth and UNICEF. It's just impossible to achieve that alone.

Nicholas Kee: And in that sense, I'm hearing that you might have some more details on potential programs for next year. As a whole, how does that bring this all together? What does that look like for INJAZ?

Nadia Abdallah: It looks a little bit like what Kevin is trying to do. So I'm going to throw this a little bit back at Kevin. For those of you who don't know, JA (Junior Achievement) Worldwide, and all of the regions at JA have the JA Company Program. It's over 100 years old. And it pretty much teaches youth, whether high school or university students, how to build a business and how to serve their community first. And it's really rooted in school systems and after-school systems.

The beauty of it is that it is interdisciplinary, and it is also action-based. The students actually go out and meet private sector donors, they have volunteers, they have mentors, and it's really a mentor-led program. So teachers, employees, the private sector, and other educators really come together and they give back in the JA Company Program. They work with students. What we're doing now is, in addition to everything else that I described in the first question, we're also revamping the JA Company Program. We're introducing master classes to our youth—high school and university students—around circular economy, sustainability, renewable energy, and responsible consumption and production, in addition to how they're linked to the SDGs. So that these entrepreneurs are now globally aware, and they can even become green entrepreneurs in the future.

The idea here is that we are embedding the education within the entrepreneurial course. But we're also doing it through a form of action, where they go and they do something. They're not only learning, but they're communicating with one another. They're also working with private sectors, and even other NGOs. We're also embarking on a journey with Goodwall pretty soon to, you know, with Pitch. So we're hopefully working with other private sectors to make sure that the JA Company Program is deeply rooted within the pillar of sustainability.

Nicholas Kee: Love, have you thought about ways in which you plan or intend to scale Hack for Earth? And I ask this as an entrepreneur connoisseur. Prior to what I'm doing now, I used to run hackathons, all day, every day, every year. And so, I'm quite interested in, I guess, what this might look like for you, for Hack for Earth, within the climate change space. Because I only did this in tech.

Love Dager: Yeah, it's interesting. I think, for us, it comes back to a lot of what Taha said, that everything is about partnerships. Like, we couldn't do anything that we're doing if it weren't for all the other organizations we work with. How can we reach out to more and more youth and more and more citizens of the world to work with them to create a solution for climate change? It’s about getting them to the point where they are in a place where they can make a difference? It's also Junior Achievement's doing. I'm a JA alumnus, and that gave me that feeling that, yes, it's possible. And this is what we want to do for people who maybe didn't go through the [JA] programs. Because if you get to the point of, yes, we can make a difference, then you get so much more engagement from people. And then you can grow the hackathons. You have to get more hackers. And then, with the partners, they can pull off their solutions and make a difference. So, it's all built on that.

Nicholas Kee: I want or at least I hope you're observing that every single person or each entity that is represented here on stage are all interconnected. Everything that we're doing, essentially, we need each other in order to carry out the mission of sensitizing and evangelizing climate education policy to reach youth globally.

Gillian, right back to you. I was wondering, from your perspective, as well, how do we sustainably look at efforts across borders? Because EY serves the entire globe. I was wondering if you had some point of view on that?

Gillian Hinde: So firstly, I think to story starts, if we can't do it in our own backyard, then can we do it at all? So I think for us, I mean, EY is a large organization, we've got close to 400,000 staff. And we started the emphasis on training as the multiplier effect in the sense. So we rolled out sustainability badges, we rolled out major learning programs. And we've tried to do that where we can. But there is also the depth of experience by the learning initiatives that we drive means that they've got to be attached to doing something in communities as well. So they're all linked to initiatives embedded, but also doing initiatives in the community. So that's been an important part of our ethos in living up to this. I think to a global staff, again, I think that's very much about community partnerships. And that's why the role of an impact entrepreneur is so critical to our program.

So how do we actually embed? Because they are working in the communities. Often, the ideas are born out of the communities that they are living in and working in. So for us, partnering with impact entrepreneurs and partnering with our client ecosystem—and amazing organizations like Junior Achievement—gave us innovation at scale. It's very hard to reach some communities. That's how we reach the global south.

I think we've got lovely stories to tell, and there are so many organizations, too, that I can think of. You know, the partnership that we have, for example, with Microsoft, is interesting. In the first few weeks, we had 6,000 people sign up from underserved communities throughout the global south. We want to go further. Because it's not just about content curriculum, it's not about just getting embedded, but it's about how can we actually convert them into jobs? A key phase for us is actually linking them to the job market. If we can't hire the people that we're trying to train, the model isn't working. So that's quite a critical thing.

We've spoken a lot about innovation today. And I think innovation is, for us, AI. There is so much investment in these amazing products and tools. But again, how do you link innovation to the local community concepts and to the impact entrepreneurs you can bring into an organization supply chain, value chain? I think those are the tenets for us.

Nicholas Kee: That makes perfect sense. Omar, to throw you a little bit of a curveball. On that same running theme, I know that you can at least imagine that the skills of a particular sort of population will be, or at least the needs will be different from somewhere else, like the global south versus the global north, or east versus west. I'm wondering if you're seeing patterns of distinction in the types of skills that would be needed for different types of populations?

Omah Khan: I think I would have to say, in general, no. We're all on different spectrums of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. There is one side to solving the climate challenges, which is scientific, and innovation. Always, the scientist needs to commercialize it, needs the entrepreneur. As we said, hands-on entrepreneurship, and how you can take a scientific idea or innovation into the business field is something that's very important. Entrepreneurship, I've seen it in Dubai. In the fifties and sixties, we had so many entrepreneurs that came from this fishing village who went on to become some very big billionaires. It shows that this kind of spirit doesn't need any certain backgrounds. It needs to have a little bit of sort of insight, a little bit of drive to achieve.

I used to manage all the international offices of Dubai Chamber. We have offices in Nigeria, we have offices in Brazil, Argentina, and in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, and many parts of the world. In Asia: India, China. And I see a lot of similarities. But as you said, your local demands, your local changes, and requirements, and your touch points. The things you can see are very important to driving the youth. The youth and be very distracted. If the more you go into theory and textbooks, the more distracted they are. The more you go and take them out into fields and factories, they can see challenges. They can smell pollution. They can see traffic congestion. It sparks that light bulb in their head. And it's the same for us. We've experienced it.

In my childhood, it used to rain in the wintertime for weeks and weeks. A few years ago, when Expo was taking off, on October 31, it was just mildly warm, and then it got cold in November. And now we're in December, and it's still so warm. So again, our kids can feel that. Again, they will look with curiosity at the challenges of your environment that drive you. I believe in giving them the gifts to appreciate, learn about innovation, and then the ability to apply it to the real world, to real-world problems.

I think the most important thing is that we give them that ability to be entrepreneurs, and have the older generation, the more capable generation, as you were saying, facilitate that commercialization. Of course, it's going to be amazing when they get their first financing, when they get their first sales or their first commission or support from the government to enact some of their products and services. And of course, we have to create the positions in organizations that cater to the requirements and to sustainability and to the environment.

Nicholas Kee: Gillian, I was wondering if you could close us out.

Gillian Hinde: I think it's just been a privilege to be here today. And I can see some familiar faces in the audience, too. Fabulous discussion. I think some of the key takeaways around the partnerships ecosystem is not necessarily new, but I think it will obviously take us a lot further. And I think two points to take away is that students from our survey with JA confirmed that they want experience. They don't just want to be talked at, they actually want to be out there experiencing and learning. And the survey that we did with JA confirmed that. The students were saying, we don't want to learn about it on social media. We actually want to experience it in the communities we live in.

Don Sedlock: Wow, what a great panel. Thank you all so much. I feel like we could talk about this for a few a few more hours to really dig deep but on behalf of JA Worldwide and the 15 million youth that we serve a sincere thanks to each of you for sharing your time and talents today. And again, big thanks to Dubai Cares and the RewirED team. Thank you all so much.