Hanns Seidel Stiftung – Egypt Office and Maat for Peace, Development, and Human Rights organized the third training workshop for local NGOs cadres in Cairo governorate during 16\17 May 2013.
The workshop came in the framework of "Responsive Decentralization for Citizens' Right" programme implemented by Maat in cooperation with Hanns Seidel Stiftung, the programme seeks to improve local administration conditions through raising the capacity of community actors and advocating decentralization, along with enabling women in the target governorates to produce community initiatives under decentralization.
22 cadres of 11 local NGOs in Greater Cairo working on localities, decentralization, and public services participated in the workshop, 40% of the participants were women.
The workshop is one of five training workshops programme to be implemented during the next period by Maat and Hanns Seidel in 5 governorates including; Beni Suef, Gharbia, Cairo, Alexandria, and Port Said. The programme seeks at providing NGOs cadres with the required capacities and knowledge to perform a supporting role for decentralization, along with strengthening their capacities to assess public services.
The training programme included several components such as; analysis for local development parties and partners and their different roles in local development process, NGOs tools to observe the performance of public service providers and potential mechanisms, community scorecards approach and how to be used by local NGOs, and decentralization, good local governance, and local system reality in Egypt under the new constitution.
The workshop indicated the NGOs capacity to bridge the gap in the local administration system in Egypt, via their work as supportive entities for communication between citizens, governmental institutions, and other development parties. As well as advocating citizens rights related to public services, this depends on providing training and qualifying opportunities, and adequate technical support for those NGOs.