Active Citizens

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.

Our local partners in Egypt

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.

Activities

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)

Tunisia

About 60 Tunisian candidates attended a participatory selection day
on 26 May 2009 at the Tunisian Scouts headquarters in Tunis.
Mr Ali Fathallah, General Commissioner of the Tunisian Scouts,
Dr Ridha Kammoun, President of the Tunisian Association Against Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS- Tunis section and
Mr Peter Skelton, British Council Director made opening speeches and welcomed participants who were invited to take part in different activities and pair work. At the end of the session, the lead facilitator and the LICD Project Coordinator in Tunisia conducted one-to-one interviews and selected 33 participants from different backgrounds and from various governorates around the country to attend the three scheduled training modules.  

The first module ran from the 1 to 4 July 2009 and dealt with systems and active networks for positive change.

The second module: Leadership Insights for Peer Support Networks and Active Networks for Positive Change run from 30 September to 3 October 2009.

In this module participants had the opportunity to meet with Scottish Participants who attended Module 2 across the region. Module 2 honoured and celebrated Arab and UK Identities and identify assets for meeting challenges in the communities. Module 2 is designed to encourage participants to think positively about their countries and to strengthen links and connections between the participants in Tunisia and Scotland.

The British Council organised the second module of the LICD project from 30 September to 3 October 2009 in Monastir.

This LICD second module was designed to encourage participants to think positively about their countries and strengthen links and connections between the participants in Tunisia and the UK.

One of the Scottish participants, Pat Elsemie said “The Tunisian performance entertained and informed, while our Scottish efforts challenged everyone's co-ordination skills and aerobic capacity. It was quite a sight seeing so many different national costumes whirling and reeling in the Strip the Willow country dance! Needless to say, lots of laughs were shared by all. We left behind the CD of Scottish music and fully expect all Tunisian colleagues to re-enact the dances during Module 3!”

As for the Tunisian participant, Zied Touzani, he added “The second project module of the LICD project was more interactive and more efficient than the first one. Indeed, we applied the theoretical methods and techniques discussed in module 1 such as the "system thinking”. Thanks to interaction with Scottish participants, we also acquired new philosophies such as "exploring identities and utilising the magic of difference" to learn from each other and combat stereotypes”

It was an opportunity to build on and practice the use of Noticing, Naming, Reframing and Questioning to interact with community leaders, reflect on future activities and share insights on facilitating positive change in the community.

The third module : Ready for Creative Community Engagement took place from 16 to 19 December 2009

In this module, all 31 participants who were selected from different Tunisian associations and NGOs and who attended the first and second module were equipped with the necessary tools, learning partners and opportunities to develop sustainable networks for active participation in community development.

During this module, participants from different associations shared with each other some of the new things learned during the Twinning Exercise. The Twinning Exercise is an exchange visit between participants from different associations. These visits  helped them practice their skills for facilitating learning and change in others.

The participants learnt about the structure of the community projects. British Council invited participants to clarify their own procedures (technical and financial), assist them to come up with ideas and apply the interaction concepts and tools for serving their community. Their project proposals will be conducted and financed by the British Council and partner organisations.

Throughout the programme, participants were members of a network (facebook), in order to stay in touch with fellow participants, share knowledge and access information.

This module was led by two in-country facilitators from our partner organisations and one Egyptian.

For more information on the project, and if you would like to be part of the project and its three components (InterAction training programme, Community Development Projects, and/or Café Society) and its network. please contact ines.zaibi@tn.britishcouncil.org