Female Collective in the Arab world: Call for participants

Background & Objectives

Sharq.Org is a pan-Arab non-profit organisation focused on promoting and nurturing pluralism across the Arab world. Our initiatives centre around community development and media production.

Together with Firma Alexandra Sandels and the Swedish Institute, Sharq.Org will over the coming two years inaugurate and nurture a collective of changemakers across the Arab world. The objective of this initiative is to enhance the participation of women and youths in peacebuilding and politics and enhance effectiveness in this regard through transnational collaboration.

The collective will, in this initial phase that is supported by a grant from the Swedish Institute, be made up of ten female leaders and twenty youths in five Arab world countries.

Working together, this collective will:

• include people from a multitude of ethnicities and religions present in the Arab world
• enhance leadership skills among youths,
• strengthen cross-border collaboration and knowledge exchanges,
• enhance confidence and skills relevant to sociopolitical participation and development
• address and mitigate unconscious biases that promote othering

Initiative activities

The objective of this call is to identify ten women who will form the inaugural leadership tier of the collective. These women will:

• meet regularly between April 2022 and summer 2023
• define the scope of the collective and its objectives and activities
• attend workshops and seminars aimed at enhancing skills and knowledge
• collectively mentor twenty youths across the region
• work together and with the youth tier to produce content in a multitude of languages spoken in the Arab world. The content will address a specific socio-political topic, to be determined by the collective, will be multi-disciplinary in nature (articles, interviews, poetry, art, photography, graphics, podcast, video, etc.) and will be disseminated for use by activists, researchers and journalists who support the mission and vision of the collective.

Times / Location of Activities

Sharq.Org will organize and host weekly one-hour meetings between April 2022 and summer 2023 to facilitate the development of the collective’s leadership and youth tiers.

The meetings will be held online on a weekday evening to enable attendance.

Meetings will take on different forms: informal brainstorming sessions, skills workshops, presentations by members and guest speakers, content development workshops. Each member of the leadership tier will be expected to attend at least 60% of the meetings, which equates to approximately 30 one-hour sessions over the course of a year. Those who attend the required number of sessions will be modestly compensated to cover costs associated with attendance, such as internet and child care.

Eligibility

This call aims to identify ten women to make up the inaugural leadership tier of the collective. Those eligible are:

• Women aged 30+
• Based in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, or Yemen
• Have at least five years of demonstrable experience in civil society activities
• Fluent in spoken Arabic

How to apply:

Do you want to join the inaugural leadership tier of this collective? Then fill out the application form before 10 February 2022.