Notes from Davos: The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting
Guest post by Asheesh Advani, CEO, JA Worldwide
Monday, January 16, 2023
The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, starts today.
Greetings from Davos.
Every year, leaders from business, government, and NGOs meet in Davos for the week-long World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting, as well as the hundreds of high-level side events offered alongside the meeting. Rather than write a note about this event for JA staff and board members as I’ve done in past years, I’m writing this for JA students and young alumni this year. This gives me an opportunity to explain why I attend the annual meeting and what value it brings for JA and other organizations that are striving to empower youth and prepare them for the future of work.
Who is coming to Davos this year?
During this year’s WEF annual meeting, attendees include more than 50 presidents and prime ministers; an additional 300+ government ministers; over 50 NGO leaders and social entrepreneurs; more than 1,500 corporate leaders, including Blackrock CEO Larry Fink and JA Worldwide Board Chair and ManpowerGroup CEO Jonas Prising; global financial leaders Christine Lagarde of the European Center Bank and Kristalina Georgieva of the International Monetary Fund; selected WEF Global Shapers and WEF Young Global Leaders; as well as UN Goodwill Ambassador Sabrina Dhowre Elba, actor Idris Elba, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. View the full program, including topics and speakers.
Why does JA attend the meeting?
The JA network has developed deep partnerships with governments in order to deliver our educational experiences in public schools in over 100 countries. In addition, we have relationships with over 70% of the companies in the Fortune 200, who support JA by providing funding and volunteer mentors in order to further connect business to education.
The WEF Annual Meeting offers JA the opportunity to present ideas, debate and deliberate, strengthen ties with government representatives and other partners who can extend our reach, and—perhaps most importantly—drive collective action to improve the lives of young people around the world.
The annual meeting agenda is both broad and deep, facilitating conversations on topics as diverse as education, the environment and climate change, agriculture and the food crisis, technology and cybersecurity, global peace, and so much more. As you might expect, the panels on which I am invited to participate tend to focus on education and the future of work, but panel topics in Davos are often overlapping. It’s difficult, for example, to discuss youth education and economic opportunity without also talking about the 1.2 billion children worldwide who are living in poverty and don’t have enough to eat every day.
This year, Ukraine will be at the center of a number of panels and discussions, especially in light of the Annual Meeting’s theme: cooperation in a fragmented world. Even this topic overlaps with our mission, as we opened a JA office in Ukraine last year in mid-February, just days before the beginning of the war. From JA Europe’s immediate focus on evacuating JA staff from the country to a longer-term global fundraiser that provides education for Ukrainian youth wherever they are, the war in Ukraine has been a focal point for JA, just as it has been for much as for the rest of the world.
At last year’s Annual Meeting, which was rescheduled to May due to COVID restrictions, I had the chance to interact with a youth delegation from Ukraine, which was there to tell the story of what was happening in their country. Of all the panels, side events, and meetings I attended, hearing their voices was the most impactful part of my time in Davos. A few months later, JA Worldwide launched our Youth Voices initiative, which aims to give young people a global platform from which to share their stories.
Each year, I’m honored to serve on panels with leaders from UNICEF and other UN agencies, current and former prime ministers and ministers of education and labor, and leaders of companies and global NGOs. Not only do these pairings lead to robust discussion, they also result in additional opportunities for JA to build impactful relationships that will help us reach more youth. The WEF gathering is unique in that it is more global than most conferences, bringing representatives from countries as diverse as Mongolia and Mexico.
One additional benefit of attending the Annual Meeting is the opportunity to submit thought leadership to Agenda, the WEF blog. This year, I focused on the three critical skills students need for the future of work. In previous years, I shared ideas about building optimism in youth, preparing youth for a post-COVID job market, speeding up the process for updating school curriculum (which was voted among the “Best of Davos”), and surviving in a fractured world. In addition, I’ve had the opportunity to partner with Grégory Renand, head of Z Zurich Foundation, to discuss youth entrepreneurship in Africa, with EY to share the findings of our study on Gen Z, and with Leo Martellotto, President of JA Americas, to explore how to reduce youth poverty. In the last Annual Meeting, I was interviewed by the Lady Mariéme Jamme, the passionate leader of Iamthecode, for her podcast which was taped in Davos.
Because of its importance in global discussions, the WEF Annual Meeting also triggers the release of important reports that we utilize in our strategic planning:
I arrived in Davos yesterday, and I’m looking forward to representing JA on the global stage this week. In addition to daily updates that we’ll post, you can watch a limited livestream of the events at weforum.org and wef.ch/youtube, and you can follow the #wef23 hashtag on social media.
Tuesday, January 17, 2023
The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting got into full swing today.
I have so much to share since posting yesterday morning!
First, the World Economic Forum announced Education 4.0 Lighthouses, which are global examples of “public-private collaborations that are reimagining the childhood learning experience and can serve as inspiration for educators, parents, policymakers and employers wishing to adopt transformative practices to improve the quality of education.” I'm delighted to share the news that JA's Entrepreneurial Skills Pass (ESP) was selected by WEF as one of these Lighthouses! The ESP is among the world's first global microcredentials for high school students, intended to assess all components of entrepreneurship as a competence (knowledge, skills, and attitude). The ESP allows students to showcase their skills to colleges, universities, and employers and engages the private sector to design training for employee volunteers who serve as mentors and design the thematic content for the JA Company Program.
Participation in the ESP has been growing rapidly beyond Europe, with JA students in over 50 countries now earning the microcredential. Read more about ESP and review the other 15 educational initiatives that made the list.
The Lighthouses work in conjunction with the newly released Education 4.0 Taxonomy, which includes a list of teachable skills, attitudes, and knowledge required by the future of work, the future of technology, and the future of a functioning society. As a member of the Education 4.0 Alliance working group with significant input into the taxonomy, I’m thrilled to see the addition of “self-efficacy” into the taxonomy, which is pulled directly from JA’s Theory of Change.
Earlier today, our JA Worldwide Board Chair and CEO of ManpowerGroup, Jonas Prising, served on the “Preparing 1 Billion People for Tomorrow’s Economy” panel. “One billion” refers to the number of jobs that will be radically transformed by technology over the next decade, and the reskilling interventions will be required by public, private, and civil-society organizations.
(It’s worth noting that, just before the start of the WEF Annual Meeting, ManpowerGroup released The New Human Age, 2023 Workforce Trends Shaping the Future of Work. Whether you work in education or are simply planning your own career trajectory, the report offers important insight into the forces and trends shaping the future of work.)
Jonas and I also sat on working-group panels throughout the day. These are not livestreamed like some of the other sessions, but are an important component of the annual meeting, because we take stock of how far we’ve come on goals and priorities set in previous meetings, and chart our future course.
Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of joining all the other representatives from civil society (that is, nonprofits/NGOs like JA) for a meeting with WEF founder Klaus Schwab. Civil-society organizations are an important stakeholder group at the Annual Meeting, including some of the largest and most impactful nonprofits in the world, like the Nature Conservancy, Human Rights Watch, BRAC, and Transparency International.
A few months ago, I was honored to be asked to deliver remarks to the civil society attendees for the Annual Meeting, because it provided me a chance to identify the common themes and goals for all of us as influencers and advocates. My key takeaway and message for the civil-society attendees, including the first-time attendees? That we’re all advocates for reducing inequality in different ways: economic inequality, hunger inequality, climate inequality, human-rights inequality, and so on. We may have different theories of change and approaches, but the underlying goal of addressing inequality unites us.
After this opportunity, I was especially honored to meet Oleksandra Matviichuk, Head of the Center for Civil Liberties, one of three winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. Oleksandra, whose organization promotes human rights and democracy in Ukraine, spoke movingly about the Russia-Ukraine war being about so much more than weapons and tanks; it’s about the global future of democracy. Although it wasn’t livestreamed, I recommend that you watch a short speech given by Olena Zelenska, First Lady of Ukraine, and a special address by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, on similar topics.
Today, I also had a chance to meet with JA alumnus Fahd Jamaleddine (WEF Global Shaper), INJAZ Oman Board Chair Khalid Al-Zubair, JA Lithuania Board Chair Vladas Lašas, and former INJAZ Lebanon Board Chair Rafi Demirjian. JA alumni and board members are active at the World Economic Forum!
Tomorrow, I’m delighted to be speaking on a panel about education and preventing lost learning. I'll include a video link in tomorrow’s update.
Wednesday, January 18, 2023
Today in Davos, I was honored to speak on the “How to Prevent Lost Learning” panel with CEOs/executive directors of UNICEF, Guild Education, Skillsoft, Amanat Holdings, and NFTE.
Although we spoke on-topic for the first third of the discussion, I would have titled this session, “The Future of Education.” Panelists made bold predictions, answered inspiring questions from the audience, and shared ideas for how to prepare young people for the future of work, despite the challenges of funding and the pace of change in government. I highly encourage you to watch it in full.
Other impactful sessions included the following:
UNICEF and Zurich/Z Zurich Foundation—a global partner of JA Worldwide—hosted a session entitled “Collaborating to Scale Impact on Mental Health.” Although a recording isn’t available, I want to stress how important both this topic and this session are, especially in light of some of the statistics shared:
Mental disorders account for 30 percent of the non-fatal disease burden worldwide and 10 percent of overall disease burden
Mental healthcare costs are expected to reach $6 trillion by 2030.
Globally, more than 1 in 7 adolescents age 10–19 is estimated to live with a diagnosed mental disorder
Almost 46,000 adolescents die from suicide each year – one child every twelve minutes, which is among the top five causes of death for this age group.
António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, gave a special address on the state of the world. Much of it isn’t news we’d like to hear, but his candor is important.
A session entitled “Building Momentum toward COP28” shared the priorities of the largest environmental meeting in the world, COP28, which is organized by the United Nations and hosted by UAE. Given the passion with which so many young people approach climate change and other environmental issues, it’s worth a watch.
I look forward to sharing another update late tomorrow or early Friday.
Friday, January 20, 2023
Greetings from Davos, with my last post of the week.
First, I want to acknowledge the criticism of Davos that we all hear. A few examples include this, this, and this. If I had to sum them up in one sentence, it would be that if you’re attempting to solve the world’s problems, a more inclusive and diverse representation of the world needs to be invited to the table and given equal weight as solutions are discussed. These criticisms are not without merit.
For us, it was productive week. We are part of an education-labor-entrepreneurship ecosystem that has an extremely high number of stakeholders, many of which attend the Annual Meeting in Davos each year. This is the place not only where solutions are discussed but also where stakeholders truly understand the overlap of their work on other stakeholders. One example of this that I heard yesterday was that, in many countries, the education ministry is focused on preparing youth for the future of work, while the labor ministry is focused on workforce development and reskilling adults for the future of work . . . with little interaction between them. This week, many of those connections were made, both broadly and by me personally.
I also met with government officials from 20+ countries, including U.S. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh, who came a long way from Washington, D.C. to Switzerland. During our conversation, I had the opportunity to share with him many of the great things JA is doing.
With over 1,500 business executives here, I also had a chance to connect with existing JA partners and start conversations with potential new partners. Partnerships are how we’ll reach our long-term strategic goal of serving 100 million young people each year, so these are always important conversations. In addition, I was thrilled that so many people from the JA network are here (mostly board members and alumni). As they shared their story of why they support JA—or how JA impacted their lives as students—their passion shines through.
Finally, one of our primary goals at this event is to get the word out about JA, and to ensure that our research, our viewpoint, and our insights are influencing the decisions made here. As I mentioned in a previous update, I couldn’t be more thrilled that JA’s Theory of Change was included in the WEF Education 4.0 Taxonomy that was released this week. In addition to JA’s selection by the World Economic Forum as one of the Education 4.0 “lighthouses” (one of 16 shining examples of the new framework in practice), I saw JA phrases and language being used in all sorts of panels and conversations. That means we’re not only impacting the students we serve, but influencing other organizations to adopt our immersive, hands-on, mentor-based approach to helping youth develop the skillset and mindset they need to build thriving communities.
Want to experience Thursday’s sessions at warp speed? Check out the WEF Day 4 wrap-up.