By Rob Cartwright | Partnerships Specialist
Our work to facilitate the capacity building and information sharing of regional partners on the ground across nine nations has continued.
Interactions among the coalition allow members to learn about what is happening in other Arab countries regarding similar issues, and to access resources and learn from the efforts of activists in other Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries to inform their own advocacy efforts.
For instance, the reason why our partner in Morocco (Mains Libres) chose to work on the custody of divorced mothers – an issue not yet on the national agenda in Morocco - was seeing the achievements of another partner who has experience working on the issue for more than a decade in Algeria, where mobilization around changing custody laws has successfully reached parliament.
In another instance, two of our partners learned from a child marriage campaign that sought to include fathers - the primary decision makers in the family - when it comes to the idea of marrying their young daughters off. One partner, the Arab Womans’ Organization in Jordan, decided to launch a literary competition for young girls. The girls were asked to write a short opinion piece about their dreams and aspirations, on the condition that each submission be accompanied by a statement from their father justifying why his daughter should win the competition. Upon witnessing the success of this campaign and the smart way of involving fathers, our partner in Lebanon (LECORVAW) is now considering adopting a similar approach in order to involve fathers in the campaign against child marriage.
Following our social media advocacy training events in September and December 2020, Equality Now and our specialist trainer Khalil Dreyfuss Zaarour have continued to follow up with the participants, providing guidance, advice and feedback on the creation and development of their advocacy campaigns and short films.
As a result, nine short advocacy films, developed under the remote supervision of the film/social media trainer, were produced, at zero cost.
The advocacy issues covered in these short films included child marriage, online sexual exploitation and sexual harassment.
In parallel, we helped each of the five partners in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and Lebanon develop a fully-fledged campaign around a family law issue.
We faced challenges in providing similar support to our Jordanian partner organization (AWO) due to the complexity of procedures and the tight control over NGOs there, and the difficulty of channeling funds to them. Instead, we facilitated the creation of their interactive child marriage campaign video and position paper by funding the service providers they employed directly.
In Palestine, the support we provided to our partner (WCLAC) consisted of funding a pioneering study around the issue of distribution of wealth following divorce. The study will document the progress on two relevant cases being considered by the Palestinian courts, and will provide a comparison of international and Islamic shari’a perspectives on the issue. This legal study, once completed and published, will serve as the research foundation upon which advocacy campaigns can be built in Palestine and, eventually, in other MENA countries, where the fair distribution of wealth is still taboo and is yet to gain traction as a rights issue.
In sum, we were able to help seven different partners from seven MENA countries develop advocacy campaigns to be initiated in 2021, exceeding the original plan of developing 3-4 such campaigns.
Furthermore, in January 2021 we organized three sub-regional webinars to help partners maximize their coordination efforts and prepare to launch their advocacy campaigns this year.
Through to the end of 2021, we will support the actual implementation of country-specific campaigns designed to reform problematic aspects of family law in areas including:
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