‘The Fate of the Region Depends on Its Young People’

AMMAN — Young people around the region can be a force for greater good or instability, and they need proper education and employment opportunities to assume their role as instigators of development, according to the head of a US NGO.

Kattouf, a former US ambassador, added that the regional unrest has had some negative effects at times on the work of the organisation, which was founded in 1951 and came to Jordan in 1956.

“The regional situation has obviously had its effect, good or bad, on our programmes across the region,” he noted, but stressed that Amideast offices remained open amidst difficult times.

“We pride ourselves on our commitment to this region and the peoples of this region. We are not people who come in because there’s a project one day and leave the next day because there’s no project,” the CEO said.

Programmes

One of the “oldest foreign NGOs operating in the region” and the first non-Jordanian NGO licensed to work in the Kingdom, Amideast offers tests for those wishing to study in the US, such as TOEFL and ITP, and provides English language training, noted Kattouf, who has been president and CEO since 2003.

It also implements the US State Department funded two-year “English Access Microscholarship Programme”, which targets young people.

“Every year about 450-500 students from around Jordan are enrolled cost-free into this programme,” the Amideast president said, adding that they are selected in cooperation with the Education Ministry and their schools.

“This reaches children in 11 governorates,” Kattouf noted.

Amideast Country Director Dana S. Shuqom added that it includes 48 schools every year.

In a programme funded by Citi Foundation, the NGO provides a year-long training course for women who have a business and want to expand it or those who want to open a new business, according to Shuqom.

It starts with 30 days of training on different aspects of growing a business and then moves on to a mentorship and also includes the introduction of success stories, she added.

“We also plan to launch, in cooperation with the Ministry of Labour, a programme sometime this year” that provides women who graduated from high school but don’t plan to pursue higher education with the skills that businesses seek before hiring someone at that educational level, Kattouf noted.

“We greatly appreciate the fact that the Jordanian Ministry of Labour has made this possible by agreeing to cost-share in kind to support on-the-job training,” he said.

For university students, Amideast administers the Fulbright Foreign Student Programme for the Middle East and North Africa in cooperation with the US State Department, according to the NGO’s website.

“Under the Amideast programme, over 1,000 students from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the UAE, the West Bank/Gaza, and Yemen have been placed in graduate programmes at universities across the United States,” according to the website.

The NGO also provides study abroad programmes for Americans in Morocco, Egypt and Jordan, where US students can learn Arabic, among other courses.

“Young people want to be well educated, want to have meaningful lives,” Amideast President and CEO Theodore H. Kattouf told The Jordan Times in an interview.

“The fate of the region depends on its young people and whether they are a force for good or instability,” he stressed.

Kattouf said the regional unrest has had its effects on Amideast, an NGO involved in education and training on employability skills, which has 20 offices in 12 Arab countries including Jordan.

“Some of our programmes are in demand more than ever before. We’ve had major regional entities come to us with employability skills projects that they wanted to fund and they wanted us to implement,” he said.

Kattouf, a former US ambassador, added that the regional unrest has had some negative effects at times on the work of the organisation, which was founded in 1951 and came to Jordan in 1956.

“The regional situation has obviously had its effect, good or bad, on our programmes across the region,” he noted, but stressed that Amideast offices remained open amidst difficult times.

“We pride ourselves on our commitment to this region and the peoples of this region. We are not people who come in because there’s a project one day and leave the next day because there’s no project,” the CEO said.

Programmes

One of the “oldest foreign NGOs operating in the region” and the first non-Jordanian NGO licensed to work in the Kingdom, Amideast offers tests for those wishing to study in the US, such as TOEFL and ITP, and provides English language training, noted Kattouf, who has been president and CEO since 2003.

It also implements the US State Department funded two-year “English Access Microscholarship Programme”, which targets young people.

“Every year about 450-500 students from around Jordan are enrolled cost-free into this programme,” the Amideast president said, adding that they are selected in cooperation with the Education Ministry and their schools.

“This reaches children in 11 governorates,” Kattouf noted.

Amideast Country Director Dana S. Shuqom added that it includes 48 schools every year.

In a programme funded by Citi Foundation, the NGO provides a year-long training course for women who have a business and want to expand it or those who want to open a new business, according to Shuqom.

It starts with 30 days of training on different aspects of growing a business and then moves on to a mentorship and also includes the introduction of success stories, she added.

“We also plan to launch, in cooperation with the Ministry of Labour, a programme sometime this year” that provides women who graduated from high school but don’t plan to pursue higher education with the skills that businesses seek before hiring someone at that educational level, Kattouf noted.

“We greatly appreciate the fact that the Jordanian Ministry of Labour has made this possible by agreeing to cost-share in kind to support on-the-job training,” he said.

For university students, Amideast administers the Fulbright Foreign Student Programme for the Middle East and North Africa in cooperation with the US State Department, according to the NGO’s website.

“Under the Amideast programme, over 1,000 students from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the UAE, the West Bank/Gaza, and Yemen have been placed in graduate programmes at universities across the United States,” according to the website.

The NGO also provides study abroad programmes for Americans in Morocco, Egypt and Jordan, where US students can learn Arabic, among other courses.

“We currently have 34 US university students in Jordan studying Arabic and many of them taking additional courses in local universities,” Kattouf said.

For teachers, “Amideast, in cooperation with another US NGO called World Learning, is piloting a programme in the Middle East to certify English language teachers.”

Funded by the GE Foundation, the project is also designed to produce in every class “a couple of trainers who can then go on to teach others how best to teach English”, Kattouf said.

“We’ve already done one cohort here in Jordan involving 12 teachers and we will have a second cohort,” he added.

Eight of the teachers were nominated by the Education Ministry from public schools and the others are from private schools.

“The reception from the 12 participants has been outstanding… They feel students now look forward to English language teaching and their fellow English teachers have taken note,” Kattouf elaborated, but stressed that “the intention” is to make the programme self-sustaining.

“We are very intent on trying to serve the needs of a particular group or a particular country. We try not to take a cookie cutter approach, just hand out the same programme and not worry if it makes sense in this country or not,” the CEO noted.

“If I had to sum up I would say Amideast: expanding opportunities, making a difference, period.”

 

Published courtesy of the Jordan Times.