Case Studies
Youth Employability and Retention Programme - Bosnia Herzegovina
The case study will be presented by Agnesa Secerkadic
The Youth Employability and Retention Programme (YERP) is a programme supported through the Millennium Development Goals Achievement Fund funded by the Spanish Government as a contribution to enhancing national ownership of the MDGs under the UN Reform framework.
The Programme is jointly implemented by UNDP, UNICEF, UNFPA, IOM and UNV in partnership with the BiH Ministry of Civil Affairs, BiH Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees, Entity Ministries responsible for labour and education, the BiH Agency for Statistics, Entity Agencies for Statistics, Public Employment Services offices across the country, primary and general secondary schools, municipalities and rural communities, individual firms as well as private sector associations, and civil society organizations from the community level to the diaspora.
The Youth Employability and Retention Programme will focus on the problem of high unemployment of young people and prevention of the drain of valuable resources. It is implemented in close cooperation with governments, private sector and civil society. Currently, due to an education system that is not fully adjusted to market needs youth employment is decreasing in spite of an increase in the labour force demand, leading to th apathy and social exclusion among young people.
Biography:
Agnesa is a communications professional with more than 10 years international experience in relationship management, strategic communications and teaching. In her role as a Communications Analyst at the United Nations Resident Coordinator’s Office in Sarajevo she coordinates the communications and advocacy activities of UN’s agencies in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Working for the largest international association of business communicators (IABC) in San Francisco, she was responsible for overseeing recognition and leadership programmes which involved strategy and planning, brand positioning and relationship management of thousands of members of the IABC. She has taught undergraduate courses at Webster University in Thailand and American College of Management and Technology in Croatia.
Agnesa is pursuing her Ph.D in Diversity Management and Governance at the University of Bologna in Italy.
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Community engagement over social media – Jordan
The case study will be presented by Malik Shishtawi
Malik will feature the development of community engagement through social media platforms, from showcasing the very first event we launched in Amman to support a charity, highlighting the challenges that his group faced in that event, and how they managed to learn from their mistakes and launch a second initiative, which was the first successful initiative in Amman involving online activists in an offline event.
Malik will also present the different initiatives that came to life inspired by the first successful initiative for different communities with different goals and backgrounds and how they built on that experience to promote their activities purely using social media.
Finally, he will explain how we came to build something much bigger based on these many small events and initiatives with the development of the first Arab Social Media Forum.
Biography:
Malik is the Founder & General Manager for the Arab Social Media Forum, Head of Wunderman Digital (Part of WPP Group Worldwide) and Founder / Co-Founder for many startups & investments.
He graduated from BAU University in Jordan and from the Swedish Institute in Sweden. Malik holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Information Systems and a Diploma in Digital Social Media. He also holds many international certificates from Microsoft, Adobe, Si, AUC, Grenoble Ecole & more.
Malik has more than seven years of Digital Marketing experience (From e-Marketing, Online Advertising, Social Media Consulting & Web Solutions) in the MENA Region.
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Community Voices – Lebanon
The case study will be presented by Hala Makarem
Community Voices is an experiential project implemented across five regions in Lebanon. It shows the impact of collaborative participatory design and action towards self-organizing communities that foster social inclusion; incorporating the substantial roles of public spaces, social transformational processes, social media and joint partnerships (public libraries, municipalities, social media experts, photographers, free-lance facilitators, etc …) supporting what really matters to people who are intent on working towards sustainable outcomes. Community projects were generated addressing education, environmental awareness, domestic violence, volunteering networks, sustainable agriculture amongst others.
Biography:
Hala is a computer and communications engineer by education with a Master's specialization in data communications, networking and distributed systems from UCL, University of London.
Her extensive work experience in programme coordination and project management with Lebanese public sector development through UNDP allowed her to discover a passion for people, processes, relationships and evolving positive outcomes.
Hala is an entrepreneur, community process host and a facilitator providing enriching spaces for empowerment, active engagement, multi-media expression, and action-based initiatives. Her inspiration led her to initiate a community learning space for collective creativity.
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Gender Information Portal of South Caucasus - Georgia
The case study will be presented by Mari Sharashidze
The UN Security Council Resolution 1325 recognizes the connection between violence against women in armed conflicts and the role of women in peace building. Georgia is facing the necessity to adopt action plans (NAPs) that could become a powerful instrument for consensus and property rights within the boundaries of Resolution 1325.
In order to implement this resolution successfully, it is essential to share experience by observing how the NAPs are implemented in other countries.
In November 2009, the Women’s Information Center (WIC) used the Internet to organise a conference on “Women, Peace and Security: UNSC Resolutions 1325, 1820, 1888, 1889”.
The purpose of the event was to create the right conditions for a constructive and healthy dialogue and to conduct an exchange of experience between experts from different countries, the representatives of different parts of society, NGOs and public authorities.
Biography:
Mari works as an Organizational Development Manager at the Women’s Information Centre (WIC). She has been working for the Centre since 2009, starting as an intern in anti-trafficking activities.
Currently she’s engaged in fundraising and project writing. She is an author of several projects in the field of Peace and Security of young people, capacity building of women’s NGOs as well as organisation staff etc.
She is a coordinator of the project “Informational and methodological support for the development of capacities of grass-root women’s organisations in Georgia. Stage II: Capacity building and policy advocacy”, supported by the Kvinna Till Kvinna Foundation.
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Badia Initiative – Morocco
The case study will be presented by Ayoub Lahlou
The Badia initiative aims to develop rural Morocco; we believe that reaching this goal won’t be possible without creating new jobs and new opportunities for employment, we also believe that there are a lot of possibilities to create those jobs since many current initiatives, NGOs and cooperatives are proving that on a daily basis, and are creating wealth for the community and supporting a positive shift in the mentalities in those communities.
We act at two levels, sensitizing young people in rural areas but also in universities, about the possibilities, and the success stories in rural Morocco, with the possibility for them to do something similar in their own communities. The second level is about empowering those young people and providing them with the tools and the assistance they might need to realize their projects.
We use social media, mainstream media, training and consultancy to reach our goals.
Biography:
Ayoub, while studying at medical school, started some voluntary work with a number of NGOs, before co-founding a local NGO with some friends in his city called Action Group for Social Services.
Since he qualified as a general practitioner, he has been working in rural areas in Morocco. This new work experience, the discovery of rural Morocco, and his passion for social work, combined with his interest in social media led to the launch of the Badia Initiative, at first a platform to learn, share and network online on rural development which is still developing at present.
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Kosovo Youth Development Project – Kosovo
The case study will be presented by Luan Hasanaj
Biography:
Luan Hasanaj began his experience with civil society in 2000. He is a student in year III in international relations.
Since starting as a youth worker he has attended a large number of training courses, workshops, seminars, conferences and study visits relating to youth and other civil society activities.
He has successfully run and managed many projects dealing with strengthening the capacity of youth and strengthening their position in decision making.
His professional experience includes founding and directing of the NGO "Liria-i", coordinating the Youth Network Istog. He is also the elected manager of the Youth Center in Istog.
Luan participated actively in the design of all documents for Youth in Kosovo, the Youth Law, the Kosovo Action Plan for Youth and the Youth charter and code. He was also involved in setting up local youth training schemes.
Since 2006, he has been a regularly elected board member of the Kosovo Youth Network and from March of this year, president of the Kosovo Youth Network.
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Improving the health status and environment in Girzan – Azerbaijan
The case will be presented by Gulnara Ismailova
The Girzan medical centre was established to target poor and vulnerable people living in remote isolated rural areas. The project consisted of the three major components: a) awareness sessions for community members on preventive measures against various illnesses, b) health education awareness sessions among schools children and their parents, c) improving the environment of targeted communities.
The project is supported by the Japanese Embassy in Azerbaijan. The direct beneficiaries of this project are the most vulnerable population (IDP, refugees and the local population) of isolated and remote communities in the west part of Azerbaijan.
During preparation period the project team decided to use new experiment and involve rural youth to discuss issues through social media. A group of students (originally from Tovuz) actively took part in discussions and suggested using Girzan district for this project. Later the local population and municipality members supported our ideas and contributed to their implementation.
As a result of project:
- 300 school children and their parents were educated on public health and healthy environments;
- Community members trained permanent health educators
- The improved environment reduced the number of infectious diseases in the communities by 10%
- The local population will not spend their money and time to travel for long distances
- Once the project is successfully implemented it will be expanded to the other communities
- Social media for next projects
Biography:
Gulnara studied political science and international economic relations in Azerbaijan. She has ten years of experience in journalism and was a regular contributor to the Central Asia Caucasus Analyst magazine (http://www.cacianalyst.org) between 2000-2007.
She has been working as a Public Relations Coordinator, Women Programme Coordinator at the Azerbaijan Youth Union (2005) and Azerbaijan Children and Youth Foundation (2009). Her main area of expertise is in women rights, employment, media, organizational development, education and training in Azerbaijan.
She launched the “Youth against Early Marriage” project in central part of Azerbaijan and worked as an expert in different projects on Youth and Employment, Effective PR Strategies for NGO, Monitoring of Women rights.
She is currently following a distance course in Human Resources Personal Practice at CIPD/ICS, UK.
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Harassmap – Egypt
The case study will be presented by Sara Eldemerdash
HarassMap is a new volunteer social initiative that will help restore Egypt’s tradition of public safety for women using mobile phones and social media based on a reporting system and community outreach on sexual harassment to change the social acceptability of harassment.
HarassMap is made up of a group of young leaders with experience in sexual harassment, private, public and social sectors, non-governmental organizations and online social media.
HarassMap is the first initiative of its kind in Egypt. For the first time, there is a system that victims of harassment can use to report sexual harassment on the spot. Just send an SMS with your location and what happened to our number (reports can also be made on the website, by twitter, facebook and by leaving a phone message). We’ll read and verify your report, then map it on harassmap.org
Blog: blog.harassmap.org
Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2215904909
Biography:
Sara is Egyptian and she is a young social media and social marketing entrepreneur. She has been working in the field of communications for social development for the past 6 years.
Despite her young age, she is passionate and motivated about social change in her country, she had the opportunity to be exposed to many different social issues and deal with different governmental, non-governmental, private, local, international and regional sectors.
Sara’s interest in social media grew after she took part in the Young Leaders Visitors Programme, which is a programme implemented by the Swedish Institute in Sweden aiming at empowering the young people with social media tools to be active leaders for change in their own communities.
Currently she is working with a team of friends on promoting social media in Egypt through the "Young Leaders Social Media Cafe" which is a monthly gathering addressing social issues in Egypt and how it can be changed through social media. And HarassMap.org is just the beginning. Working in a low income country like Egypt is a very big challenge, but its a challenge that carries a lot of hopes and dreams.
Join the FaceBook group:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_121552501238929
email: sara.demerdash@gmail.com
