Empowering young civil society leaders in the MENA region

An UNDEF project in the Middle East and North Africa is working to empower young civil society leaders to defend human rights in their communities. The project, implemented by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, included two six-day field exchange programmes in Marseille held in November 2021 and March 2022. The events brought together 25 youth leaders from across the region to share knowledge and experiences from their respective countries. The programme followed a training and coaching period for each participant, in which they attained a strong theoretical foundation on social change and human rights work and developed individual action plans for their own community based human rights initiatives. Examples of these initiatives included a workshop held in Lebanon for migrant workers on menstrual health and their rights, and human rights training for Syrian refugees. A notable example is a project by two participants from Yemen, Hisham Al-Mekhalfi and Aseel Saraih created an online platform, Dakkah, to combat fake news and hate speech, while promoting a culture of peace. Dakkah refers to the porch outside someone’s house, used as a place for neighbours to sit and talk. During the training and field exchange in Marseille, Hisham and Aseel asserted:

“The UNDEF project improved our technical skills, and helped us to build a network, and promote our project to combat hate speech and misinformation. We hope to expand Dakkah throughout the MENA region so that others can use it to share issues arising in their own countries.”