In May 2026, Arab Support Center - WOSM and Accenture Foundation Inc finalized a regional partnership that builds on their broader three-year global strategic partnership, which includes a range of activities and objectives. The regional partnership will initially focus on developing the Regional Social Entrepreneurship Program, to strengthen the operational, leadership, and digital capacities of more than 100,000 young Scouts across the Arab Region.
The program addresses a critical demographic priority. With approximately 90% of the world’s, 1.8 billion young people residing in developing economies, localized capacity building remains vital. Across the Arab Region, young Scouts are increasingly spearheading community-level interventions to address socio-economic challenges through structured civic engagement.
The initiative originated as the Arab Scout Youth Award, established to recognize high-potential social entrepreneurship projects led by Scouts across the region. Over two cycles, the mechanism mapped projects tailored to critical community requirements, receiving 53 applications from over 12 National Scout Organisations.
Awarded projects included the Ana Al-Khair initiative in Palestine, which established localized networks to enhance community access to healthcare and education, as well as Nature in a Box from Algeria, which developed a digital solution to promote environmental sustainability through a subscription service that delivers eco-friendly kits and encourages sustainable practices. The Digital Generations project from Jordan focused on creating an online platform to engage youth in learning about technology and innovation, inspiring them to use digital tools to address local community challenges.
Therefore, this regional collaboration will develop a new framework for the Regional Youth Award, scaling it up to support young Scouts throughout their entrepreneurship journey. The framework will engage a broader range of ecosystem partners, including incubators and sponsors, and provide young Scouts with the support needed to implement and scale their ideas, creating greater and more sustainable community impact.
This expanded regional framework builds on previous operational deployments, such as the global implementation of the Innovation badge and challenge. In the United Arab Emirates, the Emirates Scouts Innovate initiative engaged 17,500 young individuals in digital innovation workflows. In Egypt, the Innovation Challenge Project delivered sustainable development and project management training to more than 6,000 youth.
In addition to these initiatives, Accenture KSA donated more than 50 workstation laptops to scale digital literacy and artificial intelligence competencies for Scouts across Jordan and Palestine.
This collaborative baseline informed the development of the Regional Social Entrepreneurship Program. Moving beyond an award-centric model, the framework formalizes mentorship, problem-solving methodologies, and peer-to-peer knowledge transfers within regional non-formal education systems.
Clive Pereira, Project Lead and Creative Director at Accenture, stated: "The vision evolved from simply celebrating youth-led ideas to creating a platform that gives young people the guidance, mentorship, tools, and confidence to turn those ideas into real community impact”.
Program execution is supported by regional governance teams driving cross-sector alignment. Angelina Albandak, Youth Advisor for the Arab Scout Region, noted that the core operational priority is to transition the Youth Award from a programmatic event into an integrated development pipeline that yields sustainable community impact.
To secure long-term institutional continuity, the strategy prioritizes organizational capacity building within the beneficiary networks. May Abdelhadi, Director of Business Development at World Scouting, emphasized: "Our objective is dual-focused: to expand direct youth capabilities while simultaneously reinforcing the institutional capacity of National Scout Organizations (NSOs) to sustain these specialized frameworks independently over the long term."
Over the 2026–2029 operational cycle, the Regional Social Entrepreneurship Program will scale across participating NSOs within the Arab Scout Region, defining a benchmark model for corporate-NGO alignment in regional sustainable development.