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Projects: Empowering women
Title: Women's core group (MAKANA Level 1)
Partners: Implemented by ZENID in many locations across Jordan
Funders: Hanns Seidel Foundation
Purpose:
To create a
cadre of women who can act as ‘key informants' and leaders within their
community, carrying out community mapping, analysing data and setting
priorities, and using this as an evidence base to influence decision-makers
locally and nationally. These women
are then encouraged to act as women activists through the MAKANA programme for
collective action and claiming rights.
ZENID's
role
Throughout the past five years, ZENID has provided training, coaching and
technical assistance for the groups of women on various topics they highlighted
as a priority. The women core group conducted participatory needs assessments,
prioritised the issues and formulated plans of action.
There are now more than 150 women who have been through the core skills training. They have tackled issues such as access to education and health facilities, improving the local bus service to increase mobility for women, drawn attention to environmental problems and generally provided much-need support to each other to gain self confidence to assert their own interests within the family and community.
Achievements: addressing employment issues in Sahab
In Sahab,
for example, they identified the issue of high unemployment among women. They
noted that the Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZ) in Sahab provides enormous potential work
opportunities, but that few local women are employed there, and the majority of
the jobs are filled by migrant labour.
They also noted a high level of redundancies among those who were employed, and that a major factor
was that workers are not aware of their rights.
In response
to this challenge, ZENID and the core group arranged meetings with the QIZs,
who were very positive and keen to be partners in the process. Based on the
outcomes of discussions, ZENID helped the core group to establish the Sahab Youth Employability Centre.
The Sahab
Youth Employability Centre aims to bridge the gap between employers, industrial
city management and the workers. It aims to provide a service to young people
seeking employment, especially recent
graduates from vocational institutes and to help connect them with work
opportunities in the industrial cities. At the same time, the Employability Centre also provides these youth
with information about workers' rights so that they are aware of their rights
and responsibilities. This programme also creates links with the employers to
ensure that working conditions in the
QIZ meet appropriate standards.
This
work also connects with the project to combat child labour that ZENID also
implements in Sahab. The women of the core group play an active role in
discouraging child labour in the community and advocating against harmful and
unhealthy work practices.
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