Young people tested ideas and facilitation tools in Jerash

Global Platform volunteer trainers got skills in facilitating a workshop over four days. And in addition several ideas on how to engage young Arabs in civic development were generated.

By Heidi Catherine Born and Nadia Masri-Pedersen

31. October 2010

31 participants, five from Syria and 26 from Jordan were participating in a Global Platform training over four days on how to facilitate participatory processes.

The young people got skills in how to facilitate open discussions, brainstorms, decision-makings as well as how to manage group dynamics. The participants practiced these skills when they themselves had to facilitate the other participants and get constructive feedback on their performance.
”One of the topics that came up during the training was about finding solutions on how to engage young people in their local communities around the Middle East,” Hanaa Jumaa, one of the eight voluntary trainers facilitating the four days workshop, said.

Previously Hanaa has been participating in a training conducted by the two Danish Global Platform trainers, Nadia Masri-Pedersen and Christian Lund Jensen and the two Jordanian ActionAid Denmark employees Rinad Jarwan and Ahmad Alzhgoul. The workshop in Jerash was Hanaa’s first experience as a trainer herself.

The workshop is a part of the Global Platform strategy, which vision is to build up a team of young voluntary trainers that can help conduct trainings in the whole region.

”It was one of the best trainings I have ever been to. And I have been to many now. It was awesome and so interesting. And the training methods were so different than any other training I have been to. We would like to do something similar in Syria”, Zaman from Syria said.

On the first day of the training the group facilitated by Hanaa was brainstorming on how to enforce youth participation in the Middle East and in the end they came up with the idea of creating a community of young people who advocates for the interests of youth in the parliament.

“The participants came up with the idea that they would like to create a large youth community in the parliament. And through this initiative they would advocate for issues concerning youth in the various Arab countries”, Hanaa tells.

The participants made a plan on how to first start on a local level, e.g. at a local school, and learning from that experience. Then expanding to the level of municipalities. After a trial period of three years, perhaps the young people would have accumulated enough experience to take the initiative to a regional level.

After the workshop ended, the young people expressed how much they wanted to continue working together on this issue, an issue they first saw as impossible to even try to come up with solutions for.

“I am so happy now because the participants were so engaged and we came up with some really good ideas”, Hanaa Jumaa concluded.