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.

EGYPT

Our many years of experience proved invaluable when COVID-19 began spreading in communities and on university campuses across the United States, requiring our staff to shift gears quickly to meet an unprecedented challenge: how to ensure the safety, health, and well-being of international students in the face of a global pandemic. Our roster of students in the United States included some 300 Fulbrighters in graduate studies, 149 undergraduates in the Hope Fund and DKSSF programs, and 199 high school students in the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) Program.

As the students scattered from their universities to their homes across all 27 governorates of Egypt, university courses moved online and Amideast adjusted to providing student support services remotely and virtual training and activities. Within one week of the closing of universities throughout Egypt, Amideast moved English classes from an in-person format to a synchronous virtual format, working with teachers to adjust curricula and their pedagogical approaches, while continually improving the program by including asynchronous content.

The 30 students, who belong to the USAID-funded HEI Public University Scholarships program, were able to experience the American academic approach and values. They took on team-based projects with their American colleagues — competing to draw up the best business plan in their entrepreneurship course — that developed their leadership and collaboration skills.

The students included 38 Egyptian undergraduates in the HEI Public University Scholarships program, whose travel home was impacted in particular by a lack of international flights. With the help of the Egyptian embassy in Washington, DC, which facilitated arrangements with EgyptAir. They travelled in May in three groups on chartered flights to Egypt and were placed in a mandatory 14-day quarantine in Marsa Alam before returning home.