By Taylor Luck

AMMAN - The William Davidson Institute (WDI) announced the implementation of the Jordanian Education for Water and Environmental Leadership (JEWEL) project, designed to develop leaders who are knowledgeable in natural resource management.

The project, jointly financed by USAID and WDI, will be run by a consortium that includes WDI at the University of Michigan, the Higher Education for Development, the Centre for Sustainable Growth at Cornell University, the Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST), the University of Jordan (UJ), and the Jordan River Foundation.

JUST President Wajih Owais said JEWEL is “designed to empower leadership and to create resources and knowledge networks to improve decision-making in integrated natural resources management in Jordan.”

The project will develop a master of science programme in natural resource management at UJ and JUST, create courses for private and public sector leaders, and establish a sustainable business and innovation research centre and laboratory.

A key aspect of JEWEL is natural resource management education, which has been lacking in Jordanian education, according to WDI Director Khalid Niaf.

“You have engineers, doctors, lawyers and teachers graduating without any knowledge of how to manage natural resources. And that’s bad news for Jordan’s future,” Niaf told The Jordan Times.

The reason Jordan lacks a coherent natural resource policy, according to Niaf, has been the reluctance of officials to make difficult decisions. The main purpose of JEWEL is the development of a new generation of leaders educated to make difficult decisions and put Jordan back on track.

While intended to incorporate all natural resources, a core focus of JEWEL will be fresh water sustainability.

The Kingdom is one of the 10 poorest countries in water resources. An average Jordanian lives on 80 litres per capita daily, less than half the global average.

The available water per capita is expected to shrink from 170 cubic metres per person annually to nearly half, 91 cubic metres per person, by 2025.

JEWEL will provide leaders in the business, political, and social realms with the tools to ensure resource sustainability for the future and to avoid such a water crisis.

Unlike many international development projects, JEWEL has been tailored to be Jordan-specific.

“The ideas will not come on a plane and land. They’ll be developed at the universities, worked on by community leaders and then applied- to guarantee they are Jordanised,” Niaf stressed.

In the natural resource management masters programmes at Just and UJ, international academics and practitioners will work with the faculty to ensure that the courses have the right content and are Jordan-specific. In the future, the consortium is considering scholarships to encourage students to get a masters degree.

The Jordan River Foundation will aid JEWEL in reaching outside Amman, using the same research from the university remodelled for use by women and in rural areas.

“We feel like we haven’t left anyone out, which is important as natural resources are cross-cutting and affect everybody,” Niaf noted.

Even JEWEL’s American side has a distinctively Arab perspective.

“We have people working for free because they are Arab American and they want to help,” Niaf said.

“And it’s not just Jordanian Americans. We have Lebanese, Yemeni, Sudanese, Egyptians and Americans from all over the Arab-Muslim world who want to give back. It feels good,” he added.

The JEWEL consortium recently finished its first fact-finding mission, and is hoping to enact many of its programmes by early next year.