Empowerment and Capacity Building of Local Administrations
The project is a civil step that proves the role of civil society in formulating national policies with empowering approaches that directly target the active segments in communities and local administrations.
The movement seeks to move the targeted audience to a more advanced state of awareness of the spaces of effectiveness and partnership to ensure more effective and sustainable outcomes. The project also focuses on benefiting from the expertise or experiences of specialists who may be characterized by being distant from people and excessively involved in the technical field without communicating with the targeted audience of the decisions, which makes the expertise and specialized experience far from useful and unable to be properly applied or understood by the targeted audience of the decisions.
The project was a great success and formed a strong network of relationships between local actors in civil and social terms and between local administrations targeted by training and empowerment. The project resulted in important initiatives that express this cooperation and communication between the segments targeted by empowerment. The project targets two categories:
- Local government workers.
- Civil activists in the local community.
The project aims to:
- Empowering target groups with the basic knowledge necessary for their work in the fields of development and local administration.
- Providing these groups with the tools and skills to be able to identify their needs and draw up their plans in participatory and sustainable ways.
- Raising awareness and advocacy among members of these groups to promote the values of transparency, partnership, communication, dialogue and dissemination of knowledge.
The project is a series of workshops based on a study of the needs of the target groups and the context in which they will operate, such as: “participatory planning skills, team building and session facilitation skills, communication skills with the local community, local media tools, etc.”
- The project activities were held in the following governorates: Tartous and its countryside, Damascus, Sweida, and Homs.
Beneficiaries:
Beneficiaries
Females
Youth
The activities of this project include the following:
Training of candidates for local administration elections in Homs
The Nation Building Movement organized, within the framework of the empowerment path, a training workshop for a number of candidates for the local administration elections in Homs Governorate.
The training in the workshop was divided into a group of topics, the most important of which was a dialogue about the role of local councils in the coming stage and their relationship with the people in light of reconstruction and reconciliations, and how local administration will be a means for people to participate in political life, achieve democracy, and apply the principle of secularism.
Developing local governance mechanisms and building youth capacities in Sweida
The Nation Building Movement in Sweida city launched an initiative to develop local administration mechanisms and build youth capacities with the aim of spreading the concepts of administrative decentralization as one of the approaches to building peace and development. The initiative was launched in Sweida on February 9, 2017, and lasted for three days. The workshop targeted a group of civil society activists as well as a group of media activists and journalists.
Local Administration and Development workshop in Tartous
The workshop aimed to create a dialogue platform between local administration and civil society that activates joint work spaces between them and increases community action initiatives that aim to advance society and solve its problems. Local administration has always been the authority closest to the people; capable of creating ways that enable them to create their reality that suits their aspirations and ambitions, and participate in formulating policies. However, the lack of sufficient awareness of its executive details and laws may prevent us from benefiting from this proximity adequately. Based on this, organizing workshops and projects specialized in local administration and development is a matter of utmost necessity and societal need.
Reconciliation Areas Experience workshop
The workshop was held to read the results of the national reconciliation agreements in a number of regions with the aim of benefiting from their results and moving to build a reconciliation process that restores communication between all the people of Syria, regardless of their orientations and affiliations. The war puts us in direct confrontation with our problems and crises, so we begin to search for various means to try to restore life to the affected areas. Local agreements have always been a turning point in the course of the Syrian war, as they were a primary means to end the military presence of armed groups and thus return institutions and stability to areas that have gone out of state control.
Local media workshop and its role in development
The workshop was held with the aim of providing a group of media professionals with broader knowledge about local administration and the law regulating it in Syria as an introduction to the transition towards media keeping pace with the transformation that Syria is witnessing towards administrative decentralization. In the context of the local administration and development project, the Nation Building Movement held a workshop at its headquarters in Damascus entitled "Local Media and its Role in Development" on March 22, 2019, with the participation of media professionals from various media outlets and from different Syrian governorates.
Capacity Building workshop for local administration election candidates
As part of the "Your Role" campaign, a workshop was held to train a group of candidates for local council elections from various Syrian governorates. The workshop focused on formulating the nomination decision and discussing the needs of local communities and how to meet them. The workshop started on August 17, 2018 and continued for two days at the headquarters of the Nation Building Movement in Damascus. On its first day, it highlighted the role of local council elections and the importance of running for membership by reading the general scene of the elections from the point of view of a group of candidates from various Syrian regions, in order to run in these elections, and the motives and ideas.