Tagline: How the Sparks the Facts project is giving young people across North Macedonia the tools to find the truth and the confidence to share it
Excerpt: In a country where young people get most of their news from TikTok and Viber groups,, Future Minds Skopje has launched a hands-on program that teaches teenagers to find verified data, read it critically, and use it to say something true about the world they live in.
Ask a teenager in Skopje where they get their news. The answer is almost always TikTok, Instagram, Viber groups, or YouTube. Ask them how they decide whether something is true. The pause that follows is the most important data point of all.
North Macedonia is a young democracy navigating a complex information landscape. Regional research consistently places the Western Balkans, which includes Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Kosovo, among the most exposed populations to disinformation in Europe, with young people simultaneously the most active online and the least equipped to evaluate what they consume. Schools teach students what to think about history, mathematics, and literature. Yet very few teach them how to think about information itself: where it comes from, who produces it, and what verified public data actually looks like when you know where to find it.
The consequences are not abstract. In a region where disinformation has been weaponized to stoke ethnic tensions and distort debate about European Union (EU) integration, the inability to read data critically is not merely an educational shortcoming. It is a democratic vulnerability.
What the Sparks the Facts project does
Developed by Future Minds Skopje, a civil society organization founded in 2023 with a mission rooted in education, innovation, and civic empowerment, the project visits three schools across North Macedonia, deliberately chosen to represent the country’s geographic and demographic diversity: one urban, one multi-ethnic, and one rural. Disinformation is a problem that is not limited to those in big cities: because the country is highly digitized with an internet penetration rate of 84 percent, the rural population encounters disinformation, too.
In each school, students spend two intensive days in a Data Sprint. On the first day, they are introduced to open-access platforms like Eurostat, the World Health Organization’s databases, UNICEF’s data portals, and national statistical offices — sources most of them have never visited. They choose a civic issue relevant to their community, learn to read the numbers, and understand the difference between a cherry-picked statistic and a complete picture. On the second day, they use the MIT App Inventor to turn their findings into a mobile application, no prior coding experience required.
The most powerful moment in the entire program is the transition between those two days: watching a student go from consuming a headline to interrogating the dataset behind it. By the time they open MIT App Inventor, they are not just making an app; they are making an argument, grounded in evidence they found and understood themselves.
One of the student participants of the Data Sprint from the Mathematics and Informatics Gymnasium in Skopje in June 2025 commented: “Working with data is easy when you put it in this way. Now we are all equipped on how to handle disinformation.”
Outcomes and what comes next
By the end of the project, at least 90 students across three schools will have made this journey, from passive consumers of online content to active, critically literate civic participants. Teachers will leave equipped to run similar activities independently.
The project’s lasting legacy is the learning guide and digital toolbox being developed alongside the workshops. Both will be published on the Future Minds Skopje website in Macedonian and English, and will be freely available to any student aged 14 to 17 long after the project ends. The goal is to make the model replicable, not dependent on any single organization or funding cycle.
In a media environment where powerful actors invest in making citizens feel confused and passive, that act of confident, evidence-based communication is genuinely radical.
A democracy erodes when citizens stop trusting institutions, when young people disengage, when the information environment becomes polluted. The antidote is not more fact-checking campaigns, but a practical capacity to navigate information with confidence. That is what this project builds — and what we, as an organization, have learned is both possible and urgently needed. The teenagers sitting in those Data Sprints are not just learning digital skills. They are learning that truth is findable, and that evidence is powerful.
