What do young people lack to have a key impact on climate? Is access to international scenes necessary? And can the gap be bridged between local and global youth climate activism? From a small town in Jordan, where water scarcity dictated her daily routine with her family, to global climate spaces, Rahaf Abu Mayyaleh about climate activism and a journey shaped by one simple belief: young people do not need to wait to create change.
Some children grow up measuring their childhood in birthdays, school holidays, or the places they travelled to with their families. I measured mine in line with water availability.I grew up in Al Salt, a small city in Jordan, in a country that has long lived with severe water scarcity. In our home, water had a schedule. We waited for the day of the week when it would arrive, and suddenly the whole house would move faster. My mother would begin washing and cleaning. My father would rush to water the trees and plants he cared for. We would fill our tank and try to make every drop last until the next time. As a child, I did not know the words climate resilience, water security or environmental justice. I simply knew that water was precious. I also knew that some things around me did not feel right.
Baby steps towards leadership
At around ten years old, I started participating in school environmental campaigns, neighborhood clean-ups, school competitions and morning broadcasts. I joined the Scout movement. These were small things. Looking back, they would probably not appear extraordinary on a résumé. To me, they were enormous. They were my first experiments with leadership.Scouting became one of the most important classrooms of my childhood. Camping away from home taught me independence. Working with other young people taught me responsibility. Organizing activities taught me that having an idea is the easy part; bringing people together to make it happen is much harder. Most importantly, I learned to listen.
But my beginning was not a perfect story of a young girl discovering leadership and immediately succeeding.
Between 2012 and 2014, I would participate in an initiative, become excited about an idea, try to organize something, and then encounter the same barriers: I was young. I was a girl. I come from a small town. I had limited resources and little guidance. Sometimes there was simply nobody around me who believed that what I was trying to do could become something meaningful.
For a while, I wondered whether my voice was simply too small. Then 2014 changed my understanding of what was possible.
Different backgrounds, common problems
As more Syrian refugees arrived in Jordan, I saw humanitarian organizations working with refugees and host communities around me. I began to understand that the problems I had been noticing were not isolated.There were local realities, but they were also part of much larger regional challenges: Limited opportunities for women, youth unemployment, lack of resources, vulnerability, to name a few.
I realized something that has guided almost everything I have done since: If someone from outside our community can come to help solve our problems, then someone from our community can also become part of designing those solutions. From that point on, I stopped waiting for opportunities.
At sixteen, after a long selection process, I was selected for an elite youth leadership program and later had the opportunity to represent Jordan at the League of Arab States in Cairo.
I remember how strange it felt. I was a teenager from Al Salt, standing in a regional space where Arab leaders and policymakers gathered. I had not grown up imagining myself travelling internationally at that age, let alone entering those rooms. But the most important thing I brought back from Egypt was not a certificate or a photograph. It was a question: Why did young people across the Arab region seem to face so many of the same barriers?
When I met other young people, I saw different countries, cultures and accents — but familiar stories. We spoke about education, employment, representation, gender, opportunities and the feeling that decisions affecting our future were often being made without us. That was when my ambition expanded.
Building Community
I started by wanting to serve my community. Then I wanted to represent Jordanian youth. After Cairo, I wanted to contribute to a larger regional youth voice. I began the process of becoming a trainer myself because I realized that one of the most powerful things I could do was transfer what I had learned to someone else.I became certified in areas including leadership, public speaking and community initiatives, and later developed my work around green entrepreneurship, sustainability and climate change.
I learned that empowerment is not simply telling young people that they are capable. Empowerment is giving them knowledge, tools, networks and a real opportunity to act. That belief eventually led me to study Biology, specializing in Ecology, at the University of Jordan.
For me, studying ecology was not a departure from activism. It was the missing piece. The water shortages I experienced as a child suddenly had scientific language. The environmental degradation I had seen around me became something I could study. Ecosystems, biodiversity and climate impacts were no longer abstract concepts.
My university recognized my work several times as a success story, including recognition within the Biology Department for leadership and environmental advocacy, and later through its graduate recognition.
Still, I kept asking myself: What will happen after the workshop ends? What will happen to that inspired person who is nonetheless with no opportunities? That question pushed me beyond events and into building spaces.
I became involved in developing a youth space in one of Jordan's vulnerable communities, where I worked with more than 1,000 young people, including refugees and young women. We created opportunities for young people to learn leadership, develop green skills, explore entrepreneurship and create community initiatives.
There was something deeply personal about that work. I recognized myself in many of the young people I met. And I did not want them to spend years waiting for someone to believe in them. I kept building.
Founding IBTKRGO
Eventually, I founded IBTKRGO, a youth-led initiative focused on green digital education. The idea came from two problems I could see growing together. Young people need access to digital skills shaping the future — programming, robotics, artificial intelligence, IoT and technology.At the same time, our dependence on technology was producing an increasing amount of electronic waste. I did not want technology education and environmental responsibility to be taught separately, so we combined them.
Through IBTKRGO, we developed educational approaches that use digital skills and technology while introducing young people to sustainability and the reuse and upcycling of electronic components. For me, this was not simply about teaching children how to code. It was about telling a child: You can build the future — and you can build it differently.
The work grew across Jordan and beyond. I have reached more than 3,000 young people, including children, young women and young people from vulnerable and refugee communities. We have worked with schools and organizations and developed learning points and partnerships to make green digital education more accessible.
And IBTKRGO taught me another kind of leadership. The more I listened to young people from the region, the clearer the gap became. Young people in the Arab world were not short of ideas; they were short of access. I began looking beyond Jordan.
I joined the Global Coalition of Youth Leadership Program with ITU and Huawei in Switzerland, where I was selected among a global group of young leaders.
Meaningful participation
Then came another turning point. I was selected as one of five global Generation17 Young Leaders through the Samsung and UNDP initiative — the first Jordanian selected since the program’s launch and the only representative from the Middle East and North Africa in that cohort.At COP, I began asking policymakers a question that had started in my childhood: What does meaningful youth participation actually mean? Because I have seen how easily youth engagement can become symbolic. A young person can be invited to a panel, photographed, thanked for their contribution and then leave without having influenced anything. For me, that is not enough.
That is why I have used every tool I have found along the way. I created Rahaf for Climate to communicate climate issues in a way young people could understand and connect with.
I created the Green Generations Podcast in Arabic to bring sustainability conversations closer to young people and connect them with experts through a more accessible, youth-centered format.
The more I travelled, the more convinced I became that global exposure should never pull you away from your community. It should bring something back. That has always been my measure of an opportunity: What can I bring home? When I learned something new, I wanted to teach it.
My journey has also been full of failure moments that never appear in photographs. The funding that did not come. The opportunity that disappeared. The program I could not continue. The visa or travel obstacle. The project which did not work as planned. My early failures taught me persistence.
When people ask me what is still missing from climate action, I say that young people need to be involved from the beginning — identifying the problem, designing the solution, implementing it, measuring it and improving it. Because I have seen what happens when a young person receives that chance.
And just as I learned as a child that every drop of water matters, I have learned as a changemaker that every young person's voice can be the beginning of something much bigger.
November 2026