Programme
Numu
A short bootcamp followed by three months of coaching, for young 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, and delivers them pro bono.
The shape
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
Where we have run it
Türkiye, Jordan and Angola
Each of these ran before the work carried the Numu name. Izmir was billed as an agile and systems thinking bootcamp, Amman as agile and Scrum foundations. Same method, same shape, same people running it. All were led by Peace Through Prosperity and delivered at no cost to the participants.
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.
Luanda
University students in Luanda, 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.
In their own words
Watch
The first film was made during the Izmir bootcamp. The two interviews were recorded in Amman four months after that cohort had finished, when whatever was going to stick had stuck. Filmed and published by our co-founder Kubair Shirazee on his own channel.
Get involved
Bringing Numu to your community
We run the field editions pro bono, and we are expanding across the Middle East. If you work with young people somewhere opportunity is thin, we would like to hear from you.