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‘Student Sowt’: Arab University Students’ Podcast Launches Its First Season

CAIRO–Podium.me launch the first pilot season of a student-generated podcast, “Student Sowt”, to support and amplify the voices of Arab students.

Student Sowt spotlights the experience of university students and shares their unedited interviews and discussions talking about a range of topics that interest them. The podcast discusses issues such as the experience of medical students, the story of a 40-year old single-mom earning her master’s, bullying, changing a major, sports and more.

Al-Fanar Media, an independent publication covering higher education in the Arab region, and Podium.me, a British podcast platform dedicated to sharing the voices of youth, invited young men and women from around the Arab world to participate in “Yalla! Let’sPodcast”, a series of workshops on podcast creation. The workshops resulted in Student Sowt, a six-episode podcast by Omima El-Ghabri, Safa El-Jali, Soad Taher, Kawthar Qolqazi, Maher El-Maktary and Mohammed El-Arif, all university students from Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, and Libya.

The episodes were completely student-produced from ideation to scriptwriting and recording with the technical support of Al-Fanar Media and Podium.me.

“The voices of students are seldom heard and often-times absent in the discussions around Arab higher education. We at Al-Fanar Media decided to give them a platform to share their thoughts on whatever matters to them. We decided that the best format would be for this podcast to be student-led and limited our intervention to the bare technical minimum,” said Nasser Zawk, the communications director at Al-Fanar Media.

“The voices of students are seldom heard and often-times absent in the discussions around Arab higher education. We at Al-Fanar Media decided to give them a platform to share their thoughts on whatever matters to them.”

Nasser Zawk
Communications director at Al-Fanar Media

The first episode of Student Sowt was published on February 25, 2022, on all Al-Fanar Media’s and Podium.me’s channels, and the first season will continue with weekly episodes throughout March 2022.

You can listen to the episodes on Al-Fanar Media’s Youtube and Soundcloud channels and Podium.me’s Soundcloud.

Al-Fanar Media is a project of The Alexandria Trust, a U.K.-based charity founded by the Egyptian businessman and philanthropist Salah Khalil. The Trust was formed in response to the unprecedented opportunities that now exist to improve life chances across the Arab world and facilitate the development of a new generation of citizens across the region equipped to become active members of their societies.

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