Stories of IREX

As a Muskie fellow at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Oleg Guchgedieyev studied management and project design through an academic program in business administration. Since completing his Muskie fellowship in 1996, Guchgedieyev has made significant contributions to agricultural reform and environmental protection in Turkmenistan and in the Caspian Sea region.

For the Youth Leadership for Peace Theater Troupe, planning a participatory theater performance means creating dialogue around Kyrgyzstan’s most challenging conflicts while also sharing a laugh with fellow youth leaders.

Seven years ago, Anastasiya Buchok of Uzbekistan took the first step to learn about technology and participated in IREX’s Tech Age Girls (TAG) program. Today, thanks to that initial spark, she has a successful career working for a major software company.

While not all TAG alumni go into IT careers, all of them gain better skills and access to technology for everyday use at school and work. This project helps to close a “gender digital divide” that is sometimes attributed to girls’ reports of less positive attitudes and self-efficacy toward ICT than boys.

Nyaradzo Mashayamombe, Executive Director of Tag a Life International Trust (TaLI), is no stranger to the struggles girls around the world face: from early marriages, to limited access to education, to societal pressures and constraints on their futures. She is a fierce advocate for girls’ safety and empowerment. 

IREX is pleased to welcome the first-ever cohort of students participating in the new Kosovo Undergraduate Exchange Program (Kosovo UGRAD) for the 2012 academic year. The Kosovo UGRAD program, one of the first initiatives funded by the U.S. Embassy in Kosovo established in 2008, brings students from Kosovo to the United States to study for an academic year at a university or community college. This year three Kosovo UGRAD students will be studying in Ohio, New Mexico, and Kansas.

After spending one year in the United States through the Global Undergraduate Exchange Program in Eurasia & Central Asia (Global UGRAD) and witnessing the American commitment to environmental protection, Moldovan Tatiana Morari was inspired to make her home country greener. In the US, “everything was just recycling,” she says. If her host town of 8,000 had a recycling plant, she asked herself, “Why can’t we have one here in a city of a million people?”

Remote villages in 29 districts across Azerbaijan now have free Internet access thanks to the USAID-funded Azerbaijan New Media Project.

Although online access in the country is growing, Internet services remain slow and expensive, particularly in the rural areas. Most citizens can only access the Web in cafés, Internet clubs or at work.

To help bridge the gap, USAID and IREX partnered with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies (MCIT) to install free Internet kiosks in 30 local post offices.

Recognizing that teachers have an enormous influence on the lives of young people at critical moments in their development, they have the opportunity to shape thoughtful, empathetic, productive adults who see themselves as citizens of a global community. In honor of that global community, IREX highlights the work of our alumni of three programs, International Leaders in Education (ILEP), Teaching Excellence and Achievement (TEA), and Teachers for Global Classrooms (TGC) through a photo essay, “Teachers in a Global Classroom.”

In a brightly colored room, filled with the buzz of multilingual chatter, Hemanju Rai Thapa Magar is calm. She gently pastes a painting of traditional Nepalese women, which has traveled 7,000 miles from Nepal to Washington D.C. “These items are made by students,” Magar says, as she gently touches the colored paper “I am very excited to share with them everything I learn here.”

What is a modern library? What role can young librarians from around Eastern Europe play to promote modern services and approaches in their libraries and beyond? At the International Young Librarians Summer Academy in Latvia this summer, nearly 45 young librarians from the European Global Libraries countries convened to share ideas, learn new technologies, and develop essential skills as advocates, teachers, and community leaders. They were joined by librarians from Botswana, Columbia, and Vietnam.