Stories

Tag: youth

  • The future of work: remarks at the 9th 1M1B Impact Summit held at the United Nations in Geneva

    The future of work: remarks at the 9th 1M1B Impact Summit held at the United Nations in Geneva

    On November 7, 2025, Reda Sadki, Executive Director of The Geneva Learning Foundation, joined the panel “The Future of Work: AI and Green Skills” at the 9th 1M1B Impact Summit held at the United Nations in Geneva. Moderated by Elizabeth Saunders, the discussion explored the rapid redefinition of the workforce by artificial intelligence and the green transition. The following is an edited transcript of Mr. Sadki’s remarks.

    Living with artificial intelligence

    Moderator: You have just seen some of these really incredible changemaker ideas and so what skills and mindsets stood out to you and how do you think those can be scaled to build a workforce that is living with AI and not competing with it?

    That is a wonderful question.

    I would answer that the key skill is learning to work with artificial intelligence.

    It is likely that your generation will be the first one learning to work side-by-side with AI as a partner or a co-worker, in the same way my generation learned to navigate the Internet.

    This requires three things.

    First, being ambitious.

    Second, being bold.

    And third, being courageous.

    Things are going to change dramatically in the next three to six years.

    There is a convergence of belief among those building these systems—what some call the “San Francisco Consensus”—that within this short timeframe, AI will fundamentally transform every aspect of human activity.

    We are facing the arrival of a new, non-human intelligence that is likely to have better reasoning skills than humans.

    This is not just about new tools.

    We are already seeing AI automate the routine tasks that make up the first rungs of a professional career.

    Some may tell you AI is not coming for your job, but I struggle to see that as anything other than misleading at best.

    In our programmes at The Geneva Learning Foundation, we have already used AI to replace key functions previously performed by humans.

    So, the sooner we are thinking, learning, and getting ready to navigate those changes, the better.

    The challenge is not to compete with AI in knowledge transmission.

    The risk is what some call “metacognitive laziness”, outsourcing our critical thinking to the machine.

    What is left for humans, and what we must cultivate, is facilitation, interpretation, and uniquely human-centric skills.

    These include creativity, curiosity, critical thinking, collective care, and consciousness.

    We must cultivate judgment, contextual wisdom, and ethical reasoning.

    We are navigating the unknown, and learning to do so together – by strengthening the connections between us, by asking what it means to be connected as humans – will be critical to our survival.

    Peer learning and democratizing access

    Moderator: I have a question for you about your foundation, because you have pioneered peer learning networks that have reached thousands globally. So what can we learn from this model about how to democratize access to AI and green skills, and make lifelong learning more inclusive and action-driven?

    The Geneva Learning Foundation’s mission, since 2016, has been to research, develop, and implement new ways to learn and lead.

    Our initial premise was that our traditional education systems are broken.

    They often rely on a top-down, “transmission model” of learning, where knowledge flows from experts to practitioners.

    This model is too slow, too expensive, and often fails to reach the people and communities that are facing extinction-level threats, whether that is climate change or artificial intelligence.

    In today’s world, these broken systems create significant risks when it comes to the critical threats upon our societies, including climate change and artificial intelligence.

    In the last three years, we have made key breakthroughs in solving four problems:

    • The problem of scale: how do we simultaneously connect tens of thousands of people in a single initiative, rather than one classroom at a time?
    • The problem of speed: how do we share knowledge at the speed problems emerge?
    • The problem of cost: how do we make this affordable?
    • And the problem of sustainability: how do we create systems people will continue to use because they are relevant?

    We have developed a model that we have tested in over 137 countries, working with international partners as well as ministries of health and, most importantly, with people on the ground in local communities.

    The first lesson learned is that in today’s complex, hyper-connected world, where there is an abundance of knowledge, simply knowing things is necessary, but not sufficient.

    The second lesson is recognizing the significance of what people know because they are there every day.

    We operate within knowledge systems that tend to devalue this “experiential knowledge”, often dismissing it as “anecdotal”.

    This is a form of “epistemic injustice”.

    We believe we must value what the health worker knows, what the mother or grandmother knows, and what the youth know, in order to solve the challenges before us.

    The third lesson is the power of digital networks to enable connections.

    In the past, learning from experience was constrained by our local environment.

    With digital networks, you can make connections with people from all over the world.

    This led us to the central piece of our innovation: peer learning mediated through digital networks.

    This could be so much more than the informal chatter and negative feedback loops of social media.

    It is a structured process where participants develop concrete projects addressing real challenges, review each other’s work, and engage in facilitated dialogue to share insights.

    Knowledge flows horizontally, from peer to peer, rather than just vertically.

    This model solves our four problems.

    It gives us scale.

    There is no upper limit.

    It gives us speed.

    It turns out to be incredibly cheap.

    And it is sustainable, because people keep doing it because it is actually helping them solve their needs.

    To give a specific example, in July 2023 we launched our program on climate change and health.

    We started by listening to the voices of thousands of health workers from all over the world, who painted a very scary picture of the impacts of climate change on the health of those they serve.

    But we also found that health workers were being incredibly creative with very limited resources.

    They had already begun to solve the problems they were facing in their communities, but unfortunately, very often with no one helping or supporting them.

    That led us to calculate that if we are able to connect one million health workers to each other to be learning from and supporting each other by 2030, that group of health workers could use the power of those connections to save seven million lives.

    And for the “bean counters” in the room, this would be at a cost of less than two dollars per life saved, which is actually cheaper than vaccination, one of the most effective interventions we have in health today.

    This is such an incredible equation that some of our partners say it sounds too good to be true.

    There is an incredible opportunity to link up health workers with other segments of society, including youth.

    We see the potential from building these coalitions and networks.

    This brings us back to AI.

    We really see peer learning as key to our survival as human beings.

    We may end up working with machines that already exceed our cognitive capacities, and will almost certainly do so definitively in pretty much every area of work within the next three to six years.

    We are going to have to respond to that by strengthening the connections we have as human beings.

    AI systems are trained on global data, but humans possess deep “contextual intelligence”.

    Peer learning is the bridge.

    It is how we learn together how to adapt AI’s powerful analytics to our local realities, cultural contexts, trust networks, and resource constraints.

    We have to think about what it means to be human in the Age of AI, and learning from each other will be very critical, very key to that survival.

    Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2025. Suspended between earth and ether, Cathedral of Circuits and Roots evokes a world where technology and nature, thought and matter, coalesce in fragile harmony. Its oxidized cubes, hues of turquoise, gold, and quiet rust, resemble relics of a civilization both ancient and yet to come. The sculpture’s floating architecture suggests a digital forest, each metallic block a leaf of knowledge, each connection a pulse of shared intelligence. It speaks to the dual call of our age: to grow roots deep in human wisdom, even as we build circuits reaching toward artificial minds. In this shimmering equilibrium, the work asks: can progress be both luminous and humane — and can learning itself become an act of restoration?

    References

  • Power of Humanity, Power of Education: Presentation at the AIESEC Youth 2 Business Forum, Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt (20 August 2013)

  • Thinking about the first Red Cross Red Crescent MOOC

    Thinking about the first Red Cross Red Crescent MOOC

    You have no doubt heard about the Red Cross or Red Crescent. Some of you may be first aiders or otherwise already involved as volunteers in your community. My organization, the IFRC, federates the American Red Cross and the 186 other National Societies worldwide. These Societies share the same fundamental principles and work together to build resilient communities by reducing risks associated with disasters and, most important, by leveraging a community’s strengths into a long-term, sustainable future. The only distinguishing feature from one country to the next is the emblem in an otherwise secular movement: Muslim countries use a red crescent and Israel’s Magen David Adom uses the red “crystal” (offically recognized as an emblem) inside the star of David.

    Learning is a fundamental driver for the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. People become volunteers, very often in their youth, to develop life-saving skills through extremely social forms of learning. The connection between youth, volunteers and learning are the very core of what we do to “save lives and change minds”. There are 13.1 million volunteers in the Red Cross and Red Crescent worldwide with a shared thirst for learning. This is a potentially massive, multilingual classroom — and the affordances of technology can help us realize the previously-unthinkable goal of linking these minds and hearts across borders for the purpose of learning together, from each other.

    So where do we start sharing and, yes, co-constructing knowledge? Historically, the IFRC’s approach could be described as “trickle-down”: the Federation worked with the leadership of its members to provide guidance and expertise. Eventually some of this reached the communities where most volunteers work, at the grassroots.

    In the last three years, something amazing has happened. IFRC invested in an online learning platform and made it open to all. Despite some limitations of this platform from a “new learning” standpoint, over 25,000 people have joined and they have already completed more than 30,000 online courses (which have been self-directed, individual click-through slides with a quiz at the end), with a completion rate close to 50%. 60% of these learners are volunteers from our National Societies — and most of them probably discovered the platform on their own, without being told to access it by their national leadership.

    So, where do we go now? I’m thinking about a MOOC.

    IFRC is organizing a global youth conference to bring together 150 youth activists from the Red Cross and other organizations, like YMCA, Boy Scouts, etc. Initially, the idea was to get them to write on our Learning network’s blog in answer to a set of questions about how youth are using technology to change the world. We did this with pretty amazing results in the run-up to RedTalk #12, an online webcast event. The mechanism was clunky: we used forum posts and pasted them into WordPress blog posts… We did not have recursive feedback, the multimodal meaning was limited to posting photos and videos as attachments to the forum posts, there was no formative assessment (only a post-event self-assessment), and the questions were the same for everyone. Despite these missing affordances, we collected an amazing 50 pages of writing from young people in 12 different countries and the live event brought together over 200 people in a powerful moment of communion and knowledge sharing.

    So, why a MOOC?

    IFRC’s youth policy declares that youth have “multiple roles” as “innovators, early adopters of communication, social media and other technologies, inter-cultural ambassadors, peer-to-peer facilitators, community mobilizes, agents of behavior change and advocates for vulnerable people.” That’s a tall order for young people.

    If I had to formulate learning objectives, they might look something like this:

    By participating in the MOOC, participants will develop their knowledge and skills to:

    •  discover and reflect how different technologies permeate our daily lives, by engaging with various online technologies used for social change and sharing experiences with others through a global online conversation in the run-up to the event.
    •  define technology and its place in humanitarian and development practice, by listening to and engaging with the RedTalk guest’s story during the one-hour live webcast.
    •  clarify what technology means in the context of a local/global humanitarian and development work.
    •  identify gaps in our understanding and use of technology, including the Digital Divide and inequalities in access related to gender, race or ethnicity, socio-economic status, etc.
    •  invent new ways of using technology to make our communities more resilient.

    To explore these, across the broad diversity of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, requires a flexible, localizable scaffolding. The aim is to start with the 150 conference participants but to open it up to anyone, anywhere. I can imagine weekly activities that people could do at their own pace, after adapting them to their local context. For example, I’d love to have K-12 teachers — wherever they may be — enrolling their students into the MOOC’s weekly activities, adding their voices to the mix. But I wonder if the objectives would be relevant — and, if they’re not, how to make them so?

    At this point, it’s just an idea in search of a platform and an audience beyond our own youth and volunteering networks.

    So what do you think?