Buzet-sur-Baise, Aquitaine Jul 21, 2026 About Mohammed Ajoulou Rahmouni
Mohammed Ajoulou Rahmouni founded a social innovation organization that supports young people’s development across several regions of France, as well as in Morocco, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Togo, and Benin. He is currently completing a doctoral thesis on the organizational conditions that best support the development of youth agency, with a particular focus on working-class and rural communities.
A talk about one overlooked lever for youth development
Mohammed Ajoulou Rahmouni, founder of Citizchool and a social innovation entrepreneur working across France, Morocco, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Togo, and Benin, took the TEDx stage to talk about something simple that gets overlooked: the number of meaningful people a young person has access to, and how much that shapes their future.
Watch his full TEDx talk here:
https://youtu.be/rnVcT98gzlg?si=T4KmkM0UYl15oPD9
Mohammed is also working on a doctoral thesis on the organizational conditions that help young people develop their “power to act,” with a focus on working-class and rural communities. In his talk, he broke down how identity actually forms: through learning by modeling, through the back-and-forth between exploring and committing that eventually settles into a stable sense of self, and through two drivers of motivation, namely how capable someone feels and how much they actually chose the thing they’re doing.
Three young people, three very different paths
To make the idea concrete, he told three stories about young people from very different backgrounds: one from an affluent neighborhood, one from a working-class suburb, and one from a rural farming town. Each of them wanted to grow and build a future. What separated their paths wasn’t ambition. It was how many role models, networks, and opportunities they happened to have around them.
The numbers behind the stories
He backed this up with numbers. Citing OECD data, Mohammed pointed out that a quarter of French young people from modest backgrounds never make it to higher education, and that out of every 100 who do come from those backgrounds, only 17 end up with a degree, even though a degree is still, statistically, the surest route to a stable future. He also noted that roughly 1,300,000 young people in France today are neither working, in school, nor in training.
Three things anyone can do tonight
Mohammed didn’t stop at the problem. He gave the audience three things they could actually do, starting that night:
- Ask, without judgment. Go up to a young person, especially one from an underrepresented background, and simply ask what they want to do with their life. Then tell them something real and interesting about your own path.
- Talk about it. Bring the idea to your partner, your colleagues, your boss, so it spreads beyond you.
- Convene. If you’ve got an entrepreneurial streak, go further: bring young people together with the mentors and professionals who can actually open doors for them.
“Each of us is an encounter that can change a life,” Mohammed told the audience. “You have within you the power to light a spark on the path to someone’s future.”
Media Contact
Website: citizchool.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mohammed-ajoulou-rahmouni-00533966
Social media: @MohammedAjoulou
Source :Mohammed Ajoulou Rahmouni
