AFD in El Wadi El Gdeed
December 30, 2021
Taha Hussein in Danish
March 27, 2022
If we were to describe 2021 in one word, it would be “growth”. With 26 new ambassadors joining the team, along with a new batch of community-based initiatives joining the Dialogical Edutainment Academy as well as implementing a number of online and offline campaigns, we can safely say we’ve been busy.
By Rana Gaber
New Ambassadors
As part of our goal to engage and recruit youth from all corners of the country to be part of Ambassadors for Dialogue’s Egyptian team, we launched an open call and recruited 26 new ambassadors. The new ambassadors helped us reach places that we were not able to before such as the often neglected Wadi El-Gedid – Egypt’s biggest governorate in terms of space yet the least populated. We conducted a workshop there as well as a training of trainers to enable more youth to hold their own dialogue spaces.
“I could sense a change in my attitude towards my family when I’m engaging in any kind of conversation with them. I became more attentive to what is being said and I started using the ‘Mirroring tool’ extensively which has deepened my relationship with my Mum,” says Maysoon, a participant at the workshop in Wadi El-Gedid
AFD National seminar (Photo: Amany Fayed // AFD)
In the numbers
More than 60 active ambassadors attended our trainings who in turn facilitated more than 90 workshops for more than 1000 participants from all over Egypt. With the overall goal of strengthening their skills to host dialogues spaces, the trainings included advanced facilitation skills, graphic facilitation, and creative lab.
AFD Academy (Photo: Amany Fayed // AFD)
Arts in public schools
Arts can be an engaging tool for teachers, and this is why Ambassadors for Dialogue supported Takhta initiative and Mortagal team to implement a program in Qena. Using artistic methods such as theatre and storytelling, a group of teachers designed 12 lessons on love, compassion, respect, honesty, proficiency, and perseverance to be used when teaching the values curriculum in primary schools.
Watch the lessons and learn more about the program here.
“I believe that the Values Curriculum is a strong one, yet, for the students to understand and embody these values they need to be engaged in the learning process and arts is the best methodology,” says Ahmed Ali, teacher from a primary school in Qena
Training of teachers in public schools in Qena (Photo: Amany Fayed // AFD)
Dialogical Scene
Striving for innovation, we have designed a new program where we combine art and dialogue. The program, Dialogical Scene, has four pillars: self-exploration, communication with the other, community challenges and their solutions, and facilitation skills. We conducted four pilot workshops in Cairo and are looking forward to continue this program in 2022.
“I liked the role play part of the workshops, and getting to act as other people. I was able to see my reaction towards different characters which helped know myself more, and I was able to analyze more and express myself better,” reads an evaluation from a participant.
16 Days of Activism
During the national 16 Days Campaign Against Gender-Based Violence, we carried out 19 workshops in different governorates of Egypt, intending to open dialogue about types of violence from different angles and exploring how to use dialogue as a tool to prevent violence.
You can watch the video with the participants talking about their experience with the workshops here:
Online learning platform
The pandemic has inspired us to build a more solid online learning platform. The first step has been to develop a series of videos that explain the different chapters of our Dialogue Handbook. We will continue our efforts, so stay tuned and watch the videos here .
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