|
The British Council’s Active Citizens Programme connects organisations and people around the world and helps them get involved in local initiatives that benefit their community. It provides them with tools and assistance to develop their cross cultural engagement skills and to run social action projects in their local area or internationally. It also enables people to gain a global perspective on community-led development and to share ideas and practice through international social networks.
Association of Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW)
By working with ADEW we ensured targeting youth who were represented by majority of women. Also, as way of development to other grass root NGOs and relying on ADEWs experience, we assigned three other NGOs working in marginalised communities to work under the umbrella and supervision of ADEW.
Cognitive Centre
Cognitive Center in Alexandria worked on building capacity for other NGOs who are working with disabled communities or directly working with disabled communities as visually impaired participants. For the first time Active Citizens materials were tailored to visually impaired participants in partnership with institutes specialised in visually impaired Education.
Etijah
Possibly with the highest potential of working with youth and enhancing volunteerism. Etijah worked last year with Al Fayoum Governorate (Dessaya village) and this year again with one of the most marginalised governorates in Egypt as Behaira and marginalised slums within Cairo.
1.Facilitators training
One of our main objectives this year was to build local capacity for the Egyptian participants to ensure local capability for sustainability of the programme and the maximum reach of the marginalised community we ensured this through building a core local team capable of cascading and training Egyptian participants
a.International Facilitators training: Egyptian facilitators participated in regional trainings. Two Egyptian facilitators were leading on the regional training in Lebanon.
b.Local Facilitators training: more than 150 local facilitators are trained locally to lead on Active Citizens training.
2.Community Mapping and needs assessment
To ensure that we are working in harmony with the local needs and specifically local community expectations; all our NGOs conducted local community assessment to ensure that the trainings and outcomes are tailored to meet the local communities needs.
3.Participants Training
Targeting this year more than 2000 participants. Our NGOs focusing on Youth this year targeted different youth categories and in different geographic areas to ensure diversity:
a)Geographically: we are working in six different communities in Egypt this including: Helwan, Cairo (great Cairo), BeniSewif, Menya (upper Egypt) Behira, and Alexandria (north coast).
b)We targeted youth in vocational schools, university students and youth with disabilities as visually and hearing impaired. We targeted specific marginalised communities in terms of their professional occupation as nurses and carers in disability institutes.
4.Social Action Projects:
More than 200 Social Action Projects has been proposed this year. The British Council aim in 2011-2012 was to ensure that all participants are in direct touch with their communities’ stakeholders and that the Social Action Projects are all sustainable and based on the community needs.
5.International Exchanges:
This year Egypt is/was involved in more than 5 exchange visits, starting from May where we hosted Women Making a Difference and ending by March were we hosted one of the first five International Study Visits in Active citizens.
a)Inward visits:
i.UK Partners
1.Woman Making a Difference
2.St. Helen
ii.International Study visits 31 representatives from 12 different countries. The objective of the International Study Visit was to increase understanding of the power of global connections and to develop skills to establish global networks engaged in social development.
b)Outward visits:
i.St. Helen (UK partner)
ii.International Study Visit (UK)
| 
