Success Stories

Since the introduction of the program last March, 120 young Lebanese professionals have already completed Google Career Certificates on Coursera in five critical fields: Project Management, UX Design, IT Support, IT Automation, and Data Analytics. Over 300 more are on their way to certification, enrolled in online courses presented by Google experts that offer upskilling into the new global economy. 

They recently completed the Youth Innovation Program, offered by Amideast in partnership with Jordan’s Ministry of Youth and Inventionland MENA, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based entity that bills itself as “America’s largest invention factory” and  seeks to be a “catalyst [of] innovative thinking for a sustainable future.” 

Inbound 

This fall, with the support of Amideast, nearly 600 students from the MENA region, including more than 235 from the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, found their way to the United States, excited to return to, what we hope will be, as close as possible to a pre-Covid normal. 

The Training-of-Trainers (TOT) Programme for Life and Employability Skills provided training for 30 ILO trainers from ILO employment centers across Jordan, including in Zaatari and Azraq refugee camps, as well as career guidance counselors from Jordan’s Ministry of Labor and the Vocational Training Corporation.  

This multi-year effort resulted in a March conference and official launch of centers dedicated to supporting people with disabilities at five Egyptian public universities. The role of the new university disability service centers at Ain Shams, Alexandria, Assiut, Cairo, and Mansoura Universities is to ensure that the universities provide equal access to quality education for students with disabilities.

The first event reviewed the effectiveness of virtual learning in English language instruction, based on Amideast’s experience of providing synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid-model classes for young and adult learners in 11 MENA countries—a timely topic given the urgent shift to e-learning models in response to the COVID pandemic. The presenters—Amideast Regional Director of English Language Programs Helena Simas and Regional Director of Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL), Dr.

Amideast, the exclusive TOEIC^® test representative in Egypt, faced the challenge of providing language assessments within the new restrictions established by the government in response to the pandemic.

To address this, Amideast created BLADI (Building Local Associations for Development and Innovation), a two-year project, funded by the U.S. Department of State, that would aim to build the capacity of individual CSOs operating in vulnerable regions by improving their organizational and project management capabilities, enabling them to better serve youth and the communities in which they live.

That changed after Abdelmoula joined “Emploi FBR,” an initiative that has improved the life prospects of 435 young Moroccans like him and promises to benefit many more. Underway since January 2020, it is a partnership between Amideast, the U.S. aid agency Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and its Moroccan arm, MCA Morocco, and Morocco’s Ministry of Employment and Vocational Training and its National Agency for Promotion of Employment and Skills.

For these women, who had little or no prior knowledge of English, AMAL — which means “hope” in Arabic — is an apt name for a program that represents an opportunity to receive quality language instruction, of which they were only able to dream in the past, whether because of where they lived or societal restrictions on their ability to commute to or attend in-person classes.