In conversation with HE Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair and Marianne Bitar Karam

I think we are moving in the right direction. As you know, culturally, we don't speak about our philanthropy that much, but more and more, I am encouraging people to come out and talk about it to encourage other people as well. And so we then also repeat that we are all working on the same issues. We want to have diversity in our philanthropy; we want to run them as institutions, and we want to run them for impact. It's not for show; we have to see impact on the ground. We run them with almost KPIs; we run them like a lot of business we run because it is serious. If you want to have a serious impact on the ground, you have to take it seriously. One of our criteria is to take those refugee students into colleges where we provide vocational training or a degree. And you know, 75% of our graduates get job offers before they graduate, which is phenomenal. This is because when we set the scholarships, it's not whatever you want to study; we study the market, we find the gap in the market, and so there is a gap in this area, and we direct our scholarships to specific studies. For example, if it is nursing, we say we will only give scholarships for that because we want to encourage people to come to nursing. Tomorrow, we will have enough nursing supply; we then change it to IT, to artificial intelligence, whatever we see the vacuum, we will direct our scholarships to that. So that's why we are having very successful results in employment.

We're learning to survive. As an economy, innovation is critical, and we have to think outside the box. All our programs are trying to get students to think outside the box and be innovative. We drive innovation through our programs; even the teaching methodology involves innovation. We look for innovation from our partners.

We've been used to traditional education methodologies where the student acquires skills by listening and not by participating or being engaged in the classroom. Teachers have always been providing information rather than listening and hearing from the students' point of view. So the skills needed in the future are related to communication, collaboration, which is quite cross-cutting among all industries, creativity, innovation, problem-solving, teamwork. These are the soft skills needed. Now, the technical skills lie more in critical thinking, artificial intelligence, robotics, analytics, making proper use of data, understanding the relevant solutions, and trying to come up with creative solutions for it. So these are more the skills needed. Of course, linguistic skills. These are the skills needed for the future jobs, knowing that we no longer have the traditional job. Some jobs have completely disappeared, and some new jobs are emerging in a very fast manner. So we really need to adapt. Educational systems have to adapt pretty fast. Teachers have to be really equipped to be facilitators and to change as well in order to meet the new requirements of the market. Language is a main barrier. If the refugee is to access international markets remotely or physically, they cannot communicate; they cannot be productive. So, first, English. English is the major language, the major skill needed for refugees is digital literacy. So before moving on to catering to upcoming industries, digital literacy is a necessity. It's not about being able to use the phone or not; it's about being productively using the digital tools and devices in order to contribute to the economy. So digital literacy comes next, and then third comes advanced digital skills, be it in cybersecurity, robotics, coding, web development, digital marketing, etc. So I think we cannot move to very advanced skills if we don't start with the base.