Climate change, water scarcity and geo-political insecurity are issues that greatly affect the future of today’s youth. EcoPeace has successfully developed an award-winning youth program that fosters regional water cooperation and peacebuilding by encouraging young people to be better educated on the issues and outspoken on the need to solve them.
Following a major scaling of the youth program in Phase III, EcoPeace now seeks to expand the program beyond the basin-approach that was its previous focus, and embed its agenda in mainstream, national-level education through cooperation with our respective Ministries of Education, strategic partnerships with national and regional networks and a strong focus on teacher-training.
Given the very different socio-economic conditions in Palestine and Jordan as compared to Israel, needs differ. While in Israel environmental education has been incorporated in much of the education system through geography and environmental science classes, in Palestine and Jordan environmental education still remains on the margins. While some disciplines cover environmental topics in various sections in the curriculum books for the 10th, 11th and 12th grade, this is often limited to simple definitions of the concepts which students are then required to memorize. No link is made between these concepts and the environmental realities in the students’ own communities, nor is any practical information provided that is relevant to their own lives or could impact their behavior, and no attempts are made to internalize the issues as relevant to the local environment, economy and political context.
Programming in Palestine and Jordan will focus on curriculum development for lesson plans and teacher training to give environmental education more visibility and to build on the generic topics existing in the curriculum to educate and empower young Jordanians and Palestinians to apply these concepts in their local environmental, economic and geopolitical context. In Israel, the Ministry of Education has requested that EcoPeace help develop a new water diplomacy program that will be implemented nationwide in English language programming for grades 11 and 12. Here too, the effort will focus on new curriculum development and teacher training for purposes of scale. Additionally, through the neighbor path tours to be offered, thousands of Israeli youth will be exposed to water justice issues and through the water diplomacy curriculum present arguments and debate Palestinian and Jordanian positions.
In parallel to the school programs, EcoPeace will focus on a select group of youth with most potential to serve as impact multipliers and the highest commitment to implement EcoPeace’s vision in tangible ways. In the coming four years, EcoPeace will create a continuous multi-layered “growth” track that can keep youth in its programs engaged into young adulthood and equip them with skills that can serve EcoPeace’s vision, while at the same time providing tangible value to the participants in helping them enter the job market and become effective agents of change and regional cooperation.
Advocacy Projects
