Little ‘superheroes’ step forward to solve local issues

AMMAN — Local youth from 12 to 16 years old on Thursday displayed the innovative solutions they created to tackle endemic challenges within their governorate, as part of the “Invent Your Superhero” competition.

Organised by the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC), the EU in Jordan, the Jordanian Hashemite Fund for Human Development (JOHUD) and the Innovation Labs, the competition involved 60 youth from around Jordan, who joined efforts in teams of 10 people supervised by two older youth, Tala Al Sayyed, EUNIC communication and events officer, told The Jordan Times.

Moayad Al Snied, 16, was part of the winning team from the Madaba Innovation Lab, who created “Rekimu”, a robot equipped with an application that solves the local challenge of excess items and clothing, previously defined as the most pressing issue in the governorate.

He voiced his happiness to have succeeded in creating something that will help his relatives and friends in the governorate. “I was very interested in this project because I always wanted to give back to my community, and this competition allowed me to think with my friends and find creative ideas for change,” he told The Jordan Times, as he received the first prize alongside his team.

Thirteen-year-old Mahmoud Al Rayan also worked on this project which he said, “gave him the chance to grow some of my abilities, and think about how I can work to better my community”.

“The first step to begin finding a change in local areas is developing grassroots solutions,” said EUNIC Vice President Widad Hamarneh, adding “that is why this competition was very important as it opened these people’s eyes on the issues and gave them space to think about solutions some of which were very applicable. We believe it will help foster much bigger change in the future”.

For Razan Ghaith, one of the Innovation Labs senior coordinators, this competition highlighted the youth’s capacity to create concrete changes. “For the first time maybe, these young people had the chance to think about the challenges they face in their local communities and work on some solutions inside the labs,” she told The Jordan Times on Thursday, adding: “We gave them the chance to have their own social projects as startups in the near future.”

Throughout the week, the young participants underwent workshops and brainstorming sessions, in addition to receiving advice from experts from European countries and companies.

“It is important to ensure the youth is given support when they identify issues in their society and to give them the tools to work out solutions to address them. At the same time, we also wanted to ensure they are given the creative space to express their ideas and have fun,” EUNIC project manager, Gaelle Sundelin, told The Jordan Times, noting that “in line with the vision of the Innovation Labs, the youth were provided with all the resources necessary to develop their project, as well as a complete freedom to invent the superhero of their choice”.

“Although we used a little bit of both fun and academic learning, we needed to keep in mind that we are dealing with young minds, so we felt that a more ‘out of the box’, fun learning approach might have a more lasting effect on them,” Hamarneh said. 

The jury officials voiced their admiration and surprise at the brilliance of inventions, as Sayyed said: “They came up with much more advanced solutions than we expected and they truly took this challenge to the next level.”

For the Madaba team, the challenge was not only to identify the excess items and clothing pieces around their governorate, but also to find means to recycle them in a sustainable and beneficial way.

With Rekimu, they found a way to collect data on the location of excess items, by allowing people to inform the app of their unwanted belongings. The superhero would then sort through the excess clothing and redirect it to populations in need. 

“This is a very applicable solution, and its centralised system is truly realistic for an issue like this one,” remarked Sayyed, commending the appealing format of the superhero, which was “a Transformers-like superhero made of Legos”.

Divided among five governorates, the competition covered a variety of local challenges, including the lack of safe spaces and activity parks for children in Maan, the excess use of paper at school and waste management in general in Amman, the lack of use of solar power and green energy in general in Alkafrain. In the Jordan Valley, and gender equality and women’s representation in their society in Irbid Governorate. 

For supervisors like Ghaith, this contest also had a great impact. “Personally, this experience gave me the chance to work with EUNIC and the EU in Jordan to empower Jordanian young minds in hopes that they take responsibility for positive change in the future,” she concluded.