Episode: 43 · Guest: Mohammed Al-Buwaydi · Full Episode #43
Mohammed Al-Buwaydi created a YouTube channel called Uqda (عقدة), meaning "The Knot." The premise was direct: young Libyans face a tangle of interconnected problems — inadequate education, absent career guidance, no exposure to professional norms, no training in practical skills like CV writing or interview technique — and the channel would work to untangle them.
Mohammed delivered over forty free lectures in cities across Libya. The topics were practical: how to write a CV, how to prepare for a job interview, how to present yourself in a professional setting. These are skills that functioning education systems teach as a matter of course. Libya's system did not. The University of Tripoli, Mohammed noted, was still teaching Fortran — a programming language developed in the 1950s — in its computer science department in 2021. The curriculum had not been meaningfully updated in decades.
Uqda was entirely voluntary. Mohammed did not charge for the lectures, did not monetise the YouTube channel, and did not seek institutional backing. The project was an intervention born from personal experience: he had navigated the gap between Libya's education system and the professional world by teaching himself, and he understood that most young Libyans did not have the resources or determination to do the same.
The lectures drew audiences across Libya's geographic and political divides. In a country fractured between competing governments, militia zones, and regional loyalties, a YouTube channel about CV writing managed to attract viewers from Tripoli, Benghazi, and smaller cities. The demand was its own indictment: that a self-taught translator's free lectures were filling a gap that an entire national education system had left open.