Khristo Ayad
The world’s youth unequivocally face serious global challenges in the future that can be solved only through collaborative international efforts. Such will be led by those still in school today. Among the threats we already know of are the accelerating climate crisis, declining biodiversity, looming food insecurity, demographic shifts, but also fast-spreading trust and information crises, divided societies, and the yet-to-be-fully-understood impact of AI.
Taming the climate emergency and preserving our natural environment have been global priority for decades. Despite global warming being recognized as the single most pressing danger of our time, addressing it on a global scale has proven painfully slow. Current generations of leaders are unlikely to establish final solutions. The climate has indeed proven to illustrate complexity particularly well. Even if human-made causes can be linked to harmful effects, which is difficult, objective data takes longer to collect, and political decision-making often lags behind scientific understanding.
At the same time, different states have different levels of responsibility for this crisis and different interests regarding their own economic development. You can simply not compare the United States to Bangladesh. And yet, the individual social and economic development of each nation leaves a direct footprint on the planet’s environment. No country, region, or culture is insulated. Everyone is affected.
Combined Skill Sets
From an academic perspective, innovation and decision-making in complex contexts require a profound education and skill set. This comprises the ability to methodologically break down an issue into manageable units and find suitable levels of analyzing them. Managing complexity also involves dynamic variations that call for a high level of flexibility. Acquiring these competencies alone is a demanding process, requiring continuous critical and causal thinking.
The added imperative of sensible cross-border collaboration in addressing problems of global urgency necessitates a complementing dimension of multilateral training and experience. In other words, tomorrow’s innovators and decision-makers need to also be tomorrow’s diplomats and bridge-builders.
Research holds that such core competencies are best developed through structured interaction and active dialogue with others. Top international business schools, for instance, apply simulations and digital modeling approaches in groups of peers. Dynamic exchange about experiences, expectations, limitations, and critical reflections on observed systems’ behavior lies at the heart of these teaching and learning designs.
The approach cannot be merely abstract. While young people gather the experience to collaborate in real-time across borders, they also learn to negotiate meaning and overcome cultural assumptions. This involves a framework that blends hard skills with human understanding, something hardly achievable in classrooms working in isolation.
Multilateral Junior Academy
A good example of how learning and international exchange can be meaningfully innovated, is the recently launched Multilateral Junior Academy on Global Challenges (MJA), founded and conceptualized by Prof. Dr. Frank Himpel, an international business and economics scholar from Germany’s Anhalt University of Applied Sciences.
Kicked off at the German International School Doha and supported by Qatar’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education, UNESCO’s Regional Office in Doha, the German Embassy in Qatar, the Goethe-Institut Gulf Region, and the knowledge platform InStrat, the initiative’s first edition is connecting secondary students from Qatar and Germany to specifically explore the shared climate challenge. The exercises are mirrored in partner schools in both countries, with students engaging in parallel discussions and exchanging outcomes for joint reflection and further elaboration.
Enabling peer learning between classrooms that may otherwise not meet, students work on questions around sustainability, water, and energy, pressing topics that resonate both locally and globally. They learn and apply scientific reasoning, consider economic implications, and reflect on each other’s distinct local perspectives. As they present and respond to one another, they cultivate vital competencies to address complex international problems.
The format of the MJA is as balanced as its purpose. The different sessions are carefully moderated, providing room for both academic instruction and open conversation. Guests from partnering organizations contribute insights, while students work in mixed teams to assess problems and explore new solutions. In doing so, they act as youth diplomats and experience multilateralism in action.
Prospects
While its Qatar-Germany edition in 2025 has focused on sustainability and global warming, the MJA is already planning coming editions to involve more states and other challenges of global importance.
Multilateral platforms of this kind need to be built from the ground up rather than top-down. It is not highbrow declarations that shape them. On the contrary, it is the daily-life encounters in the local classrooms of this world where the networking and learning from one another takes place. Methodological learning about strategies to solve global complexities needs to be developed through exchange across borders, cultures, views, and educational roots. This holds particularly true for the young, more interconnected, generations across the world. For them, learning from one another in their accustomed classrooms is key to transforming isolated into unified behavior where all equally work towards common goals.
From an educational perspective, three key components support sustainable cross-border exchange:
First is language. Having secondary school students work on the same tasks and exchange their findings requires a common language. English often serves this purpose, but language education must be further emphasized to ensure everyone can participate.
Second is methodology. As there is no right or wrong in what students produce, there is a need to learn weighing pros and cons of each output, and to extract an agreed, joint point of view. This teaches perspective-shifting and compromise, hallmarks of diplomacy and scientific collaboration.
Third is content, covering a range of facets that advance students further. Spanning from knowing the formal requirements of studying and working abroad to understanding certain scientific instruments, content ties methodology and language into impactful learning.
The MJA brings these components together, empowering students not just to understand global issues, but to respond collaboratively, intelligently, and diplomatically. Building these platforms today, is investing in building a generation of informed, skilled, and empathetic leaders, capable of working beyond differences, in the interest of their own shared futures.
— Khristo Ayad is a strategic communications consultant and public diplomacy analyst based in Doha.
