Arab Women’s Policy Center in MENA

The Academy for International Development-Middle East (AIDME) is implementing a three year development project in the Middle East and North Africa region. The project entitled “Arab Women’s Policy Center (WPC)” to be implemented jointly with six partner local organizations in six different countries in the MENA region (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen) during 2013-2016.

Through the WPC project, AIDME is working to address some of the challenges facing women in the MENA region especially women political participation. The program overall goal is to increase women’s active participation in public spheres in the MENA region for sustainable and gender equitable changes in policies and practice to ensure that the voice of women at all levels, including the poorest and most marginalized, is heard.

AIDME implemented a five-day BRIDGE workshop for group of women leaders and activists from Tripoli, Libya. The workshop took place in Amman – Jordan from 13 – 17 March 2014. The reason to move the workshop from Tripoli to Amman was a result of the deteriorated security situation in Libya. The objective of the workshop was to build the capacity of a group of Libyan women leaders on governance and election in order to play an active role in policy making to increase women political participation.

The facilitation team comprised three BRIDGE facilitators who participated in the preparation and delivery of this course:

Hassan Hussein

Ahmed A. El-Wahed

Mireille Ndayra

All facilitators participated in the design, preparation and implementation of the workshop. The facilitation team met before the workshop to finalize the preparation process and to ensure that all workshop-related material is ready.

Twenty-three participants represent women leader in several NGOs from Tripoli, Libya participated in the five-day training course. Twenty-two of them were women.