Programme
Numu
Agile training for young leaders: a short bootcamp followed by three months of coaching, for people who can see a problem in their own community and have no budget to fix it with.
What it is
Learning to read a system, then act inside it
The mini-MBA works with micro-entrepreneurs who already have a business to run. Numu works one step earlier, with young people who can see what is broken around them and have never been handed the tools to take it apart.
Participants map the system they are standing in, find the place where it is stuck, run one small change, look honestly at what happened, and go again. The methods come from agile delivery and systems thinking, stripped of the vocabulary that normally keeps them inside corporate offices.
Numu is developed with Change Craft, who run the universities edition. Peace Through Prosperity leads the field editions, which run on sponsorship and are free to the young people who take part. Both sit under our programmes.
The shape
Agile training for young leaders: a bootcamp, then twelve weeks of company
Teaching on its own changes very little. What changes things is the months afterwards, when someone is trying the new thing and it has not started working yet.
Bootcamp
Two days in a room, working on the participants’ own communities rather than case studies. Everyone leaves with a first experiment they have committed to running.
Coaching
Regular calls for three months. The work belongs to the participants. The coaching is there for the weeks when an experiment fails and stopping looks reasonable.
Showcase
Teams present what they did, what it cost them to learn it, and what they would do differently. The universities edition closes with a formal showcase event.
- Agile principles, in plain language
- Systems thinking and causal loops
- Stacey’s Matrix, for telling simple problems from complex ones
- The Johari Window
- Empathy mapping
- Plan, Do, Check, Act
- Iterative delivery on a two-week rhythm
- Facilitation, practised rather than described
What a participant can do by the end, topic by topic, is set out on the learning outcomes page.
Where we have run it
Türkiye, Jordan, Angola, Ethiopia and Pakistan
Every edition has been led by Peace Through Prosperity and run with a partner who already holds the room — a university, an NGO, a camp-based charity. That is how two days of teaching reaches young people a visiting trainer would never find, and why the coaching that follows does not evaporate when we leave. Sponsorship pays for the cohort; the partner brings the people; the alumni stay in the network afterwards. Some editions, including Izmir and Amman, ran under other names before the work was called Numu.
Izmir
Twenty-six students from Izmir University of Economics, Dokuz Eylül, Ege University and Bakırçay, along with seven interns from the JTI summer programme. Monthly coaching calls followed. Delivered with Yesim Ozudogru and Ayşegül Özcömert, and sponsored by JTI.
Amman
Our first Jordanian cohort, run with Change Craft on 24 and 25 September 2024. Seventeen participants travelled in from across the country, including Irbid, for two days of teaching followed by three months of coaching. Led by Kubair Shirazee and Iyas Seidan.
Baqa’a refugee camp
A day inside Baqa’a with Helping Hand USA, working with six young people and two of Helping Hand’s own change agents. By the close of the day each of them had a business idea they could describe and defend.
Karachi
Four university editions, led jointly with Change Craft: two cohorts at Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology, a follow-up workshop for the first of those, and a first cohort at NED University. Twenty-five students came through the December cohort.
Karachi, on film
One day of immersion, then three months of guided growth. The film was made at Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology during the university editions run with Change Craft.
Luanda
Run with the Catholic University of Angola (Universidade Católica de Angola, UCAN), and our furthest cohort from where the organisation started. Alumni of this work are among the teams now running the Grassroots Playbook, alongside crews in Ethiopia, Türkiye and Pakistan.
The film was made in the room across the two days.
What changes
The question people are asking by the end of the day
Participants arrive asking how to find work. Somewhere between mapping their own community and testing an idea against it, the question changes shape into how to create something of value where they already are. It is a small movement and it is the entire point of the programme.
The day before the Baqa’a session we sat down with two participants from the September 2024 Amman cohort, who we have been coaching since. One of them has asked to train as a coach himself. That is the part that does not photograph well and matters most.
None of this is charity in the usual sense. We are not giving people money or equipment. We are handing over a way of thinking that they own afterwards, and that they can teach to the next person without us in the room.
It is the same argument as the mini-MBA, made to a different generation. Our approach explains why we build it this way, and the impact page carries what the older programme has produced.
In their own words
Watch
Three short films, none of them scripted. The first was shot in the room in Izmir. The two interviews were recorded in Amman four months after that cohort finished — long enough for the enthusiasm to wear off, and for whatever was going to stick to have stuck. It is the closest thing we have to independent evidence: participants describing their own results rather than us describing them. Filmed and published by our co-founder Kubair Shirazee on his own channel.
Keep reading
Numu sits alongside the mini-MBA in our programmes. The method behind both is set out in our approach, and what the work has changed is on the impact page.