2021 WISE summit provides a platform to highlight the challenges faced by young change-makers

Youth leaders gathered to discuss the challenges facing young change-makers at the 2021 WISE Summit, a biennial gathering of educational expertise from around the world hosted by Qatar Foundation’s global education initiative.

In a session titled Supporting Young Changemakers: Engineering Change in the Society, participants explored topics including the lack of 21st Century skills being taught in curricula, global connections, and entrepreneurship education

"The pandemic has shown us how important it is to listen to young people and contribute to their wellbeing and health," said Vivian Leung, Global Education Partnerships and Programme Specialist, UNESCO.

"According to the statistics, more than 90 percent of students and youth were out of school at the height of the pandemic. This is the biggest educational disruption in history, so in order to change education, we need to change the way we interact with it.

"This requires a shift in power, because the dynamics of power in schools and education are currently very much against its users. So we must start by shifting power dynamics to ensure that young people are able to take action and decisions about things that affect them, such as education.”

Leung pointed out that ways of teaching need to change in order to encourage change-makers to innovate, saying: “Reimagining education is the key to our common challenges.

“School is routine. Inspiration and innovation are the key to breaking this routine, and this is called experiential learning, or learning outside the traditional classroom.

"We’ve seen how important learning online, or through videos, channels, and people just sharing valuable skills and knowledge, is in the past two years during the pandemic when schools were closed. Even in a non-technical world, I think we've also seen with the pandemic, in rural communities, that education and the transfer of skills through families or communities and even in villages was the reason people were educated when schools were closed, some of which are still closed today.”

Adewale Olasupo, a young education advocate from Nigeria, told the session: “There is a lot that young people can do to change society and change the situation in which they live, so we need to listen to young people.

"Once young people are asked what they want to change in education, they talk about curricula. In our country, our curricula teach us how to get a job, but after graduation we don't have enough skills for that job, so we become unemployed. That explains a lot of things about the disconnect between the job and the education we receive.”

Olasobu explained that education is important for young people because they can be leaders of change in society, and that decisions about them should not be made without them being part of the decision-making process, explaining that she learned this through her participation with organizations that advocate on equality and quality of education.

"The community we grow up with is important, and we need to learn how to inculcate positive critical thinking in our children and youth and integrate it into our education system as well,” she said. “That's why we need to reorient the purpose of education, which is one of the things we can start doing locally before we can achieve it globally."

Paul Muller, Co-Founder of edtech venture Coleap, agreed, saying: “Change really starts at the local level, which is very important, because local communities are growing very quickly into global communities, and that may be because our challenges are becoming much more global than it was before.”

Concluding the panel discussion, moderated by Natalie Magness, Student, Qatar Youth Power, Mueller explained, “Our education system is built on a linear basis: after high school graduation, we go to university and then get a job, as if everyone should walk the same path.”

"But most young change-makers don't realize that they can do more, like creating an organization, or starting a project that could make a bigger impact, and a big part of that is about education and skills.

"I think what we need to change is the idea of opportunity distribution, and I'm very confident that's going to happen, because education is moving more and more online, and that means there are a lot of opportunities out there which are easy to access."