With unemployment in most Arab countries remaining stubbornly high, there is now a growing realization that, for the region to move forward, it must address the widening gap between labor market demands and educational system’s supply. Naseem Tarawnah looks at INJAZ, one organization that has been at the forefront of bridging that gap by using an enterprising style of teaching and learning to plant the seeds of change.

The year is 2050 and predictions made a little under half a century ago by an organization once known as the United Nations have all come true. The Arab world’s population of some 290 million has more than doubled. Poverty is rampant and so is unemployment. Natural resources, an important source of economic growth for the region, have been depleted and almost everywhere, there is a mismatch between jobs generated in the labor market and skills formed by the education system
There are too many engineers; many of them are driving taxis now. Students are still struggling to earn degrees in computer programming even though by now practically every programming job in the world has been outsourced to India. Meanwhile, barbers hang archaic marketing degrees in their parlors, because once upon a time it was what everyone was told
to study.
As cynical a look into the future as it may be, with no immediate solutions on the horizon, the reality is not too far away.
Naturally everyone has a theoretical answer to our region’s problems; everyone seems to have an idea where the fault lies. Yet, perhaps the single most pressing issue facing the entire Arab world today is that the current supply of labor is simply not meeting the demands of the private sector.
That 70% of the population in the Arab world is under the age of 25, only serves to complicate matters.
You may have heard the name “INJAZ” spoken in certain circles. You may also have brushed it off as just another NGO joining the ranks of the many organizations trying to make a difference, but a cliché is one thing INJAZ is not. From a simple pilot program, to one of Jordan’s most important yet unknown exports, INJAZ has now spread to many countries in the region.
Funded by USAID and private sector companies, the primary goal of INJAZ is to meet the demands of the labor market with a supply of skilled workers. It does this by traveling back in time and starting right at the beginning: with the students.
It Starts With One (In the Beginning)
The year is 1999 and a little pilot program called INJAZ is launched by Save the Children. Professional volunteers from the private sector make their way through several public schools across Jordan, teaching roughly 240 students the skills they need to face the future that awaits them once they graduate. Two years later, the program spins off under the umbrella of the Junior Achievement (JA) worldwide network and Her Majesty Queen Rania, who has taught several classes as a volunteer herself, launches INJAZ as a local nonprofit organization. The year is 2007 and over 4,500 volunteers from a few dozen private sector companies have imparted a lifetime of knowledge and experience on 160,000 students in 117 public schools and 23 universities; and that is just in Jordan.

Across the region
In these few years INJAZ has spread far past the seven governorates of the Kingdom and into nearby countries including Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt, the UAE
and Oman.
INJAZ Jordan’s role has been largely that of an exporter of the Arabized programs, helping to tailor them to meet the demands of the various Arab countries. “It is a Jordanian success story that has gone regional” said Soraya Salti, Senior Vice President of JA in the MENA region. “Having Her Majesty Queen Rania on board as our regional ambassador has given us huge credibility and we have grown under her wings, as she has grown in importance over the past
eight years.”
Queen Rania and Jordan’s Minister of Higher Education, Dr. Khaled Toukan, both enormous advocates of the program, used their influence in the region to convince other Arab states to get the ball rolling in their own countries. However, after the initial start up phase led by Jordan, INJAZ took on a life of its own. The way INJAZ programs are specifically applied to each country shows just how differing the realities can be throughout the Arab world.
“In Palestine, our students are suffering a lot from the Israeli occupation,” said Randa Salameh, Project Officer for INJAZ Palestine. “Our students feel that INJAZ is giving them the opportunity to ventilate their emotions and to express their thoughts and feelings.” INJAZ has been operating in Palestine since 2005, reaching public, private and UNRWA schools in the cities of Ramallah and Nablus.
Meanwhile, Kuwait is faced with another type of burden all together. With 90% of total export earnings in the country coming from hydrocarbons, non-oil industries continue to lag far behind. According to Rana Kamshad, Executive Director of INJAZ Kuwait, the undiversified economy has placed heavy burdens on the government to be the main source of employment for its people.
With the public sector saturated and no educational programs designed to prepare Kuwait’s youth for the private sector, INJAZ has filled the void. “Through the Company program, INJAZ Kuwait will seek to spur wealth creation and entrepreneurship among the youth in Kuwait, making them less dependent on the government for employment”, said Mrs. Kamshad. INJAZ Kuwait hopes to see roughly 1,000 students graduate from its Company and Bank in Action programs by the end of this year.
In Egypt, where people aged 10 to 24 make up one third of the population, INJAZ has been trying to facilitate the absorption of youth into the workforce, bringing education and employment closer together.
Concern with Egypt’s environmental status has lead the local INJAZ office to work closely with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to create a new curriculum aimed at addressing environmental issues and their relation to business. “This was done in order to have the next generation aware of how businesses effect the environment,” said Dina Al Mofty, Executive Director of INJAZ Egypt.

Rising Stars
The success of INJAZ can also be measured without the numbers. At an all girls school in Giza, volunteers from Citibank taught a Personal Economics course, where they asked students to come up with a creative business idea and design a feasibility study for it.
In a matter of time, 13-year old
Nesrine Mohamed turned her hobby of making accessories and dresses for her dolls into a profit generating
business.

Meanwhile, students in Jordan used the power of numbers to start a company that distributed flyers for local firms on several campuses in return for a small fee.
In the Maadi district of Cairo, a classroom of students at an underprivileged girl’s school was broken up into groups and told to come up with a project to implement by the end of their 10-week Personal Economics course. One group decided to grow flowers in pots they designed themselves, while another painted a variety of picture frames. A third group chose to reuse their old jeans and create their own line of decorated handbags.
A classroom of ninth grade girls at a school in Jordan were so inspired by INJAZ’s Leadership course they took charge of their own environment by starting to produce trash cans to place in their school’s backyard.
After conducting a feasibility study, Ahmed Mohsen, a 13-year student in an underprivileged boy’s school in Egypt, successfully opened the first popcorn stand in his neighborhood. The stories seem endless and vary from one country to another.

The company
The INJAZ program is based on courses originally created by the JA organization, which currently operates in 113 countries worldwide. INJAZ Jordan has played the primary role of Arabizing JA programs to create a curriculum in the Arabic language that is also tailored to fit the needs of other Arab countries, since what works in one place may not necessarily work so well in another. Of the various courses INJAZ now offers, such as Personal Economics, Job Shadowing and Global Business Ethics, perhaps the most interesting is The Company. Starting at the ninth grade level, classrooms under The Company program are transformed into a simulated hands-on business environment, where students learn how to set up an actual company and go through the stages of its evolution. The students are exposed to a multitude of business elements including conducting market research, designating positions within the organization, delegating tasks, electing officers, buying materials and marketing their product. Students even get to sell INJAZ-made stocks to raise capital and when the company begins to expand throughout the duration of the course, students also learn how to, prepare financial statements, pay stockholders dividends and finally liquidate their company.
“In The Company course, students have to be creative in coming up with their own ideas for a business,” said Sulaf Al-Zu’bi, Executive Director of INJAZ UAE. “In selecting their own board of directors, they learn how to work as a team, develop leadership skills, and learn how to engage in effective negotiation.  They also improve their math skills and other abilities that they can apply to the rest of their school curriculum.”
The Young Arab Leaders (YAL), an organization that brings together a network of over 300 successful young leaders from the Arab world, has worked closely with INJAZ in running and developing The Company program. Spread out across the region, YAL’s local chapters undertake various initiatives on the ground that target specific issues in their own countries, with YAL Jordan choosing to focus primarily on education
and entrepreneurship.
“The first thing we decided was not to reinvent the wheel,” said Marwan Juma, CEO of Xpress Telecommunications and Chairman of YAL’s Jordan chapter. “When it came to education and entrepreneurship we wanted to look around and see who was already on the ground and how we, as YAL, could contribute.”
With INJAZ’s programs already running throughout the Kingdom, YAL decided to pick a single area and improve on it, hence the birth of The Company program. The vast network of YAL members provide mentorship in the classrooms where the program is run, as well as funding for the Arabization of the JA program and a regional competition.
“We’re hosting a contest in mid-May where we take the best business concepts from the region and invite their student creators to come to Amman and compete in ‘The Battle for the Best Student Company’, which is judged by a jury of YAL members,” said Mr. Juma who will be acting as chief judge of the contest under the patronage of Queen Rania. Sponsored by YAL, the competition will bring together 2,500 high school students from INJAZ member countries for the first time in the Arab world.
Before coming to Amman, INJAZ students will first have to compete on a national level in a competition sponsored by Aramex. “There’s nothing more important in my life today than to give back and share all that I’ve learned”, said Fadi Ghandour, CEO of Aramex “I want to help youth stand on my shoulders and see the horizon beyond the high wall of deprivation and mediocrity.”
The Company is more than just a program; it aims to shift paradigms. “The concept basically is to change the mindset of the younger generation: to stop thinking as merely dependent employees and to think more as entrepreneurs,” said Mr. Juma, a sentiment also shared by Omar Al-Ghanim, Chairman of INJAZ Kuwait. “Today our young talent, our future, aspires for lifelong employment in government offices, and that is not consistent with our Kuwaiti spirit, nor with our Kuwaiti mercantile heritage.” However, Mr. Al-Ghanim feels that this unconstructive path was in part paved by business leaders, educators and parents. “We are the ones who have forgotten to teach them that the world is full of possibilities, and we have not given them the courage to dare to dream, and to actively pursue their full potential. We need to do this, not because our country needs it, but because we need it as well. We need talented managers, great visionaries, entrepreneurs, and bold thinkers.”
This concept of a self-sustaining mechanism, fueled largely by the private sector, has become the primary long-term objective of INJAZ. “We want the private sector to open  its arms to embrace the same students they will employ one day,” said Mr. Al-Ghanim, adding that “Today the private sector has one chance to stop complaining about the way things are and change them to the way they should be.”

Through the system
Arab governments have been largely receptive to the program, allowing INJAZ courses to work alongside their ministries of education, complementing their national curriculum. The doors of opportunity that INJAZ has the ability to open through funding, access and hands-on experience, is virtually limitless, especially since the emphasis has been on underprivileged schools where the demand for something of this nature is high.
“For Jordan’s Ministry of Education, to actually allow us to go into these schools is in itself an achievement, because you can’t just waltz into a classroom and say: ‘this is what I want to do.’ There’s a process.” said Mr. Juma.
Dr. Khaled Toukan, Jordan’s Minister of Higher Education, has been a strong advocate of INJAZ and in encouraging its duplication in other Arab nations. In letters sent out to various Arab ministers of education, Dr. Toukan called INJAZ “…one of Jordan’s most important initiatives [and] it’s our ambition to take this experience to the rest of the Arab world.” Fortunately, such a call has been heard and acknowledged throughout the region.
At a time when the Omani government is busy combating its 28% illiteracy rate and the substantial number of school drop outs, the timing of INJAZ was perfect according to Shabib Al-Ma’mari, Executive Director of INJAZ Oman. “The INJAZ program is free and for everyone. All we expected from the Ministry of Education was a classroom of students,” said Mr. Al-Ma’mari. Since the first pilot program was launched in 2005, Oman’s Ministry of Education has asked INJAZ to cover every school in the country and is planning to introduce economic- and commerce-related subjects into the national curriculum to complement INJAZ’s work.
The organization however has also had to struggle to overcome cultural and social constraints. Some may not be as receptive to an educational idea that does not involve books, studying and rigorous testing.
Lina Ejeilat, who volunteers through Fastlink in Jordan, teaches a classroom of eight grade students at a girls’ school once a week for a duration of 10 weeks. The course entitled, “My Surroundings and I,” allows students to become more aware of who they are, as well as the role they play in their communities. An avid reader herself, Mrs. Ejeilat decided to encourage her students to pick up a book as an extra curricular activity only to be told by a fellow teacher that the school had received complaints from parents over some of the books she had recommended. These included the works of classic Arab writers such as Gibran Khalil Gibran and Najeeb Mahfouz.
While most beneficiaries of the INJAZ program are high school students, the program is beginning to expand into higher education with more and more universities implementing specific programs alongside their curriculums. This opens up new possibilities as well as new issues to consider, such as the desire for post-graduate students to open up their own businesses. This is very relevant in a region that is not well known for its enthusiasm when it comes to financing young entrepreneurs, especially if they come from an underprivileged environment where INJAZ programs tend to operate. Although INJAZ has peeked the interest of the banking sector in some places, it remains to be seen if such interests are translated into actual funding of students who want to have their ideas realized.
However, even though INJAZ has hit the ground running, it is still taking its first baby steps in the Arab world. According to Soraya Salti, the primary goal of INJAZ has been to inspire a spirit of entrepreneurship in young students. “They will spread the seeds of change. We want to first teach them how to discover themselves; to realize that they are capable of doing so much. Once they have that spirit, they’ll have the confidence to go out into the world and succeed as individuals; having the resolve to overcome obstacles and succeed as entrepreneurs.”
With INJAZ managing to effectively bring together the private and public sectors to work in concert towards a common goal, the future of the Arab world they aim to shape will undoubtedly triumph over any shroud of cynicism that may cover it today.