The YouthMADE Festival is a global celebration of youth creativity and innovation that invites students, educators, and advocates to showcase youth-led work. Leading up to the 2026 YouthMADE Festival, we are sharing a series of stories highlighting youth creators and changemakers around the world who are putting their hands, hearts, and minds toward projects and causes they care about.
In this story, Ali-Mansur shares how he developed EcoEducation to foster youth-led sustainability in Central Asia and beyond.
I study at Dubai College, an academically rigorous school in the United Arab Emirates. Dubai is an interesting place to build a sustainability platform because the Gulf region is one of the highest per-capita greenhouse gas emitters globally, but at the same time the focus on sustainability is growing at a rapid pace. Most students I talked to there had never thought that taking their own sustainable action was something feasible. That gap between where I was living and what I was learning became the starting point for EcoEducation.
Founder, Ali-Mansur, presenting a recycling innovation which won a national award.
Block quote: It started with a simple realization: sustainability education was completely invisible to most people.
It started with a simple realization: sustainability education was completely invisible to most people. The students who needed it most, in places like Central Asia and the Gulf, had no access to quality content that could actually move them from awareness to action. So I decided to change that. I started by understanding where the gap in the market was, and how I, as a 13-year-old student at the time, could solve it.
At first, I started with one school in Central Asia. Then, students and schools across the region became interested. That’s when I realized this wasn’t just a project anymore. I recruited ambassadors and students who could take what they’d learned and turn it into real action in their own communities. We went from me doing everything alone to 80 ambassadors across the region running their own sustainability initiatives.
EcoEducation being invited to speak at a COP28 Sustainability Panel about the impact we have made.
The moment it became real was at COP28. I was invited to speak on a panel about youth-led sustainability education, sitting next to policymakers who had spent decades in this space. They were asking me how we got students in regions like Central Asia engaged with sustainability. Hearing their feedback and understanding what they thought was missing from policy completely reshaped how I thought about the platform: It wasn’t just about teaching anymore. It was about building a generation of young people who could take sustainability awareness and turn it into real, tangible action in their communities.
Since then, we’ve begun partnerships with UNDP, UNICEF, and government schools. We’ve translated content into multiple languages and reached over 3,000 students across three continents. We’re currently expanding our environmental justice content with help from our partners and building partnerships with school networks in Southeast Asia.
Ali-Mansur Presenting at DCICC, which included over 15 schools and 100 students
I came in thinking developing the courses was the hard part, but that’s maybe 20% of the effort. The other 80% is outreach, partnerships, managing people, and convincing organizations that a student-led platform is credible. Cold emailing United Nations departments at 16 teaches you a lot about persistence.
The biggest challenge was credibility. Getting institutions to take a student-run platform required showing results first, then asking for partnerships. We had to have credibility and a solid system before anyone took us seriously.
I’ve learned about myself that I care more about building access than building products. Every project I’ve started follows the same pattern: find something expensive or exclusive and then make it free. My long-term goal is simple: To democratize access to resources for students across Central Asia and the world as a whole.
EcoEducation Seminar in Partnership with an NGO in Bukhara, Uzbekistan.
Students need to work on projects they care about because that’s the only way they’ll push through the hard parts. Nobody sends cold emails to 50 organizations for a school assignment. I did it for EcoEducation because the problem felt real to me. Creativity and problem-solving only show up when the issue feels personal.
My advice to teachers: let students build things that exist outside the classroom. A school-driven project dies when the grade is submitted. A project with real impact keeps going because the student wants to keep going. Give them the space and trust to pursue problems they actually care about.
My advice to students: start before you feel ready. The first version of EcoEducation was embarrassing. The courses were basic, the website was rough, and I had zero partnerships. But starting ugly gave me something to improve, which gave me momentum, which eventually gave me COP28 and government partnerships. Getting started may seem hard, but it can be summarized in one sentence: you need to put something out there and let real feedback shape it.
