Despite the progress registered with regards to enhancing women’s economic participation into local and national development, women’s economic activity in the Arab region yet remains the lowest in the world, resulting into the highest dependency ratio. Furthermore, the population pyramids of both Lebanon and Morocco shows a clear predominance of youth, who typically encounter major difficulties in finding qualified jobs and are thus prone to migration towards urban areas and emigration – a phenomena that dramatically drains qualified human resources out of their areas/countries of origin.

General objective:

The project “Promoting Women’s and Youth Participation in Local Development Processes” (WYD) intends hence to address the constraints hindering the access of women and youth to local development services in selected regions of Lebanon and Morocco by establishing two Women’s and Youth Desks (WYDs) which will act as catalysts for the achievement of the intended results of the action.

These desks draw on a successful experience championed by the Province of Rome through its ‘Paola Desks’ (Sportello Paola) and WYD will seek to develop a context-specific adaptation of the model, tools and methodologies of this model to the Southern Mediterranean context. The Paola Desk model offers the following features:

• Activities of the Desk target women and girls in offering business and skills development training, with ad hoc assistance to the creation/development of enterprises in the new emerging sectors. The conciliation of life time and training/work time is part of the assistance provided, in order to schedule flexible arrangements that can facilitate the participation of women;
• Ad hoc promotional plan and wide dissemination of activities and results in order to ensure that the potential beneficiaries use all the services in the adequate sequence and depending on their needs;
• Mentoring: promoting networks to initiate among the beneficiaries exchange of experience, partnership and commercial relations, and promote meetings and development of promotional and negotiation capacities within the socio-economic and territorial context (actors of local development);
• Networking: develop and create strategic relationships between the beneficiaries and the socio-economic context. The networking activity is a fundamental moment to spread the information on the project that will involve local authorities and other institutional actors to collaborate in organizing awareness activities.

Who will benefit?

Women and youth enhancing their employability/entrepreneurship skills, and their families in Hermel and Tangiers; Lebanese and Moroccan women and men who will benefit from improved local governance; Italian stakeholders (counsellors women and youth entrepreneurs) who will benefit from the exchange of good practices and enhanced dialogue opportunities across the Mediterranean.                

The target groups are 100s of women and youth living in Hermel, Lebanon and in Tangiers, Morocco; 30 men and women counsellors and employees in local councils.

Expected achievements:

The actual project intends hence to establish two WYD services offices one in Hermel, Lebanon and one in Tangiers, Morocco. The creation and transferring of the action is expected to take about 36 months, to be implemented a number of steps:

1. Set collaboration and understanding between the three partners about the objectives and the procedure to achieve these objectives
2. 4 persons from Hermel and Morocco will attend a fact finding mission in Italy to understand the good governance applications in Province of Rome especially Sportello Paola’s model.
3. A fact finding mission will take place in Hermel and Tangiers.
4. Preparing an assessment of needs and existing conditions.
5. Producing a training toolkit (how WYD will work)
6. Conduct WYDs Training of Trainers in Hermel and Tangiers
7. Starting to apply the Sportello Paola activities by the WYDs in Hermel and Tangiers:

• Awareness raising towards an entrepreneurial culture.
• Training a group of women and youth to develop their capacities and knowledge on entrepreneurship.
• Support services, start up and enterprise development to motivated entrepreneurs.
• Community’s awareness activities on gender equality and activities to promote women’s active participation in local governance

8. As pilot projects, offering developing of business plan and training courses for the local beneficiaries.

Period:

From 1/3/2010 – Till 30/11/2013

–      LB- Planning and Development Agency- Hermel union of municipalities- PDA (Lebanon)

–      PP1- Women Union Action (UAF)- Morrocco;

–   PP2- Province of Rome- Italy