"<< Objectives >>In this first youth exchange project of the SEKEM Austria, a group of motivated young people will meet with students from the Heliopolis University for Sustainable Development, founded in 2012 by SEKEM Egypt founder and alternative Nobel Prize Laureate Ibrahim Abouleish, in Egypt.The title of the project is ""Greening the desert- TOGETHER! Acting against climate change"". This title reflects the core themes of the youth exchange.For more than 40 years, SEKEM Egypt has been engaged in sustainable, biodynamic agriculture and in greening desert areas to make them fertile for the people living there, to provide them with a livelihood and to revitalise and professionally and culturally educate the community in the spirit of the SEKEM impulse.The issue of CLIMATE CHANGE/CLIMATE PROTECTION is very much on the minds of the youth in Europe and has become more prominent in Egypt, as the venue of the UN-Climate Conference (COP27) in 2022. The young people will work together on the topics of ENVIRONMENT, CLIMATE CHANGE, ECOLOGY and AGRICULTURE in a variety of ways.In doing so, they learn to work together as an intercultural team, with different cultural and social backgrounds, to raise their awareness of cultural similarities and differences and to develop tolerance, acceptance and understanding for other opinions, approaches and behaviours.The project is intended to contribute to raising awareness and to show possibilities for action with regard to the topic of climate change. Especially through the encounter and cooperation with young people from Egypt - a country particularly affected by climate change - not only their own future perspective is included, but also that of the people they get to know (also emotionally).The participants should be shown possibilities to become active, to question their personal behaviour and to get involved in this topic in the future. Getting to know the country of Egypt and the living conditions of the Egyptian young people creates understanding for the situation of the young people, broadens the personal horizons of both groups of participants and opens up new perspectives on their own culture, way of life and values.For the young people, the project offers the opportunity - sometimes for the first time - to come into contact with European or Egyptian young people, to make joint learning experiences and to break down prejudices in the process.The project should contribute to personal development by actively involving the participants in the preparation, planning, implementation and follow-up of the youth exchange. They will train their critical thinking, expand their communicative and artistic skills and learn to evaluate and critically reflect on project activities and its results.<< Implementation >>This eight-day exchange project will involve 13 young people each from Austria and Egypt. The female and male youths with different social and religious backgrounds are between 17 and 26 years old.The AUSTRIAN young participants are familiar with the SEKEM initiative either because they are or were pupils of the Waldorf School Graz, or because they are members of the SEKEM Austria association. The motivation and interest for the topic of the youth exchange project are decisive for participation.The EGYPT GROUP consists of young students from the Heliopolis University for Sustainable Development in Cairo, which emerged from the SEKEM initiative in Egypt. The Egyptian youth are disadvantaged young people as they come from remote, rural, underdeveloped areas and would not have the opportunity to study at the university without a scholarship.Furthermore, without project funding, they would have no financial means to participate in a youth exchange project. They have not had the chance to travel to their own country so far and are being intensively prepared for the exchange, both personally and linguistically. Both groups are accompanied and supported by 2 group leaders and 1 trainer each.After a meeting at the main SEKEM farm near Cairo, the participants travel together by bus to the SEKEM farm WAHAT, about 400km away in the western desert, near the village of Baharija Oasis. There they live in simple, functional accommodation (build with clay) and are provided with food, most of which is produced on the farm.They interactively deal with the ""GREENING THE DESERT"" project of the SEKEM Initiative and with the topics of ecology of the desert, sustainable agriculture, education, clay construction and sustainable tourism.In WORKSHOPS, the participants will plant trees and learn how to build with clay and thus make their own contribution to climate protection. They will get in touch with the inhabitants of the WAHAT farm, visit the small school, play with the children, celebrate, and thus get to know the life of the local people. In accordance with the SEKEM educational model, the young people will engage in artistic activities, record their impressions in drawings and train their eye for details.A joint EXCURSION to the ""White Desert"" is planned to experience the beauty of the desert on the one hand and the drama of aridity hostile to life on the other.The activities are accompanied by daily REFLECTION ROUNDS and group dynamic activities in which the participants are expected to get involved. The project will be documented in writing, photographically and with the use of social media.On the way back, the pyramids and the CAMPUS OF THE HELIOPOLIS UNIVERSITY will be visited. The last two days will be spent on the main SEKEM farm, where the participants will be able to experience impressively how, during more than 40 years, a formerly barren desert area has become a fertile, green landscape with trees, fields, sustainable agriculture, and jobs for almost 2000 people. The project will be concluded with an evaluation and a presentation of the experiences and learning outcomes at a joint CELEBRATION.<< Results >>We expect the young people to broaden their knowledge on the topic of ENVIRONMENT, CLIMATE CHANGE, ECOLOGY and AGRICULTURE and to develop an awareness of the topic and the possibilities for action, as well as to broaden their own perspective on it.We hope that the participants will be motivated by their involvement in a climate protection project and by their own experience of the desert to become involved in the topic of climate protection in the FUTURE.We expect the two groups to come together as an open, creative, active and tolerant group, learning from each other and thus acquiring INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCIES. The project will support the participants in their PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT by training soft skills that will be beneficial for their further education and career entry.Participants will improve their language skills, especially in English, and enhance their communication and presentation skills in the FOREIGN LANGUAGE. They will gain practical LIFE EXPERIENCE and test their artistic skills. All participants will gain experience with NON-FORMAL LEARNING METHODS and try out modern communication technologies for planning, implementing and disseminating the project results.The two organisations involved gain experience in the implementation of a youth exchange project, which will be very useful for the planning of FUTURE PROJECTS. The two organisations involved will gain experience in implementing a youth exchange project, which will be very useful for planning future projects."

Egypt’s population is growing rapidly, yet natural resources like water and land suitable for habitation and agriculture are limited while others like renewable energy sources are not yet readily accessible. Therefore, the “Sustainable Development Strategy: Egypt’s Vision 2030” was developed by the Egyptian Government to prepare for the social and economic consequences. It includes challenging goals and targets in areas like land reclamation, agriculture and food processing as well as research, technology development and higher education. These goals can only be met, if new holistic approaches are being pursued that embrace the latest technological developments and are both sustainable and interdisciplinary. Feedback from stakeholders of the quadruple helix of producers and industry, universities, policy makers and society, clearly demonstrates a need for specialists in “Sustainable Resources Management” who have a generalist background in uncertainty prediction and different fields of sciences, like ecology and environmental sciences as well as engineering, including civil, water, electric, electronic and agricultural engineering. They need to be able to plan, set up, maintain and optimise complex systems like aquaponics farms and automated ground water pump systems that are both PV driven and connected to the grid. Thus far, cross cutting study programs are plainly focused on agricultural graduates, while appropriate offers for engineers and environmental scientists are missing. This limits progress and restricts technological optimisation and long term environmental effect prediction. Therefore, this project will develop an interdisciplinary study program, offering MSc and advanced diplomas in Sustainable Resources Management. It will focus on crosscutting issues, employ the latest learning methodologies and address technical as well as social and skills, required to implement sustainable technical solution to the challenges in food production and processing.

Egyptian emigrants to the big cities or crossing the Mediterranean to Europe are most often young men belonging to rural rather than urban areas. Migrants and refugees move to Europe driven from their country of origin (“push factors”) and because they are drawn to Europe (“pull factors”). The challenge to be addressed in this project is reducing the number of people seeking to leave the countryside or their countries due to the lack of attractive prospects. In Egypt, agriculture and rural regions clearly remain a source of resilience for many families in the face of economic shocks. This project supports the Egyptian rural-community with the necessary qualified graduates and university expertise to improve agricultural productivity, enable more sustainable food production, develop the poor villages, enhance farmers’ income and their living conditions to prevent migration to cities or abroad. The project has five specific objectives that can be summarized as follows: 1. To identify the push factors for migration from rural communities and identify the needed qualifications to support rural development. 2. Modification and re-orientation of the existing post- and undergraduate curricula to supply the market with graduates who contribute in the implementation of the country’s sustainable development vision and ensure the sustainable rural development. 3. Establishing four DeVilage Service Offices at the four Egyptian universities to provide technical support for the farmers and public and private sectors. 4. To develop a capacity building programme to train and equip the professors in the Egyptian universities with the knowledge and tools to address the different dimensions of sustainable agriculture and rural development.5. To develop Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as Open Education Resources (OER) for spreading the knowledge and raising the awareness of different stakeholders.

Egypt SDGs Agenda for 2030, aiming to build up collaborative channels between EG HEIs and local, regional and global organizations for the implementation of the SDGs, enhance the innovation skills of students, use technology to develop a system of gathering, monitoring and reporting data to enforce implementation of the UN SDGs, create programs involving SDGs awareness and agenda, and motivate funding organizations to continuously modernize and finance the EG HEIs.INVOLVE is aiming at strengthening the role of the Egyptian Universities in the achievement of the environmental Sustainable Development Goals “SDGs” through enhancing their organizational governance capacities, creating current and future SDGs implementers, and upgrading their operational facilities necessary to the implementation of innovative practices for the achievement of the environmental SDGs for better climate change management. This will be expressed by the outputs of the project; Sustainable Development Center in EG HEIs providing knowledge and skills of SDGs, environmental SDGs Videos and Booklets, University wide module on Sustainable Development, trained EG staff in EU, updated EG HEIs strategic plans in the context of SDGs, official decrees in EG HEIs integrating environmental SDGs in their daily operations, and mobile equipment for environmental measurements leading to environmentally sustainable Campuses in EG HEIs.

The Middle East and North African region has faced one of the most critical refugee crises, with global consequences, especially for EU. Egypt has received more than 400,000 refugees from Syria alone with 30,000 of them being of school age and only 50% enrolled in public schools. While Syrian refugee children are allowed to enroll in public schools, the majority go to refugee schools organized by the Syrian community, since Egyptian teachers lack skills to tackle the needs of refugee learners. Refugee children are a unique learner group due to their prior traumatic experiences. There is need of a pedagogy focusing on refugees that most teachers, even refugee ones, do not possess. Refugee teachers in Egypt, estimated to 4,000, face considerable constraints in accessing certified in-service training. NGOs and other organizations have gone some way to addressing refugee children’s schooling, but their interventions are very limited and not tied to educational pathways that lead to certified lasting programs. Both Egyptian and refugee teachers should undergo training to gain awareness of the refugee experience as well as the cultural backgrounds of refugee learners so that they can be responsive to refugee needs and sensitive to trauma reactions. These problems and challenges could be tackled through the development of an innovative in-service teacher certification program enabled by blended learning, established in the faculties of education. ReTeCp responds to a cross-cutting priority by giving access to refugee teachers to the Egyptian HEIs through a post-graduate diploma focusing on these issues. By the end of ReTeCp project, about 700 teachers, including refugee teachers will be trained and in the next 4-6 years years all refugee teachers and an increasing number of Egyptian teachers will be undergoing life-long certified training that will highly contribute to the right of refugee children for quality education (SDG4) in the host countries.