Media coverage
Al-Ray Palestinian Media Agency · 2017-10-08
A report on PalThink launching a project to promote democratic and civic values among young people in Gaza, with 22 participants. Shaban explained that the six-month project, funded by the Canadian government, includes ten lectures and radio programmes on democracy and political development and three training courses on fighting corruption, social accountability and transparency.
A report on PalThink launching a project to promote democratic and civic values among young people in Gaza, with 22 participants. Shaban explained that the six-month project, funded by the Canadian government, includes ten lectures and radio programmes on democracy and political development and thr…
## Launch of the Project to Promote Democratic and Civic Values Among Youth
08 October 2017 10:45
PalThink for Strategic Studies launched the project “Promoting Democratic and Civic Values Among Youth” in the Gaza Strip, with the participation of 22 young men and women and university students.
Dr. Omar Shaban, Director of PalThink for Strategic Studies, spoke about the project, which targets the youth category, as they are the largest segment in society, with the aim of raising their levels of democratic and civic knowledge.
He said: “Over the years of division, youth were its most prominent victims, as the democratic process and elections were frozen, depriving young people of exercising one of their basic rights, namely participation in shaping the political system through the ballot box.”
He stressed the importance of the role of civil society institutions in helping youth build and strengthen awareness through democratic and civic education. Therefore, the idea of the project to promote democratic and civic values among youth came to serve this direction that PalThink seeks in strengthening democratic concepts and practices among Palestinian youth.
Shaban explained that this project, which will continue for six months with funding from the Government of Canada, includes ten educational lectures and radio episodes on issues of democracy and political development in Palestinian society.
He added that it also includes three training courses on topics related to combating corruption and strengthening the tools of social accountability and transparency in Palestinian society, noting that PalThink has worked to bring in academic and specialized competencies in this field during the project period.
For his part, Mokhaimer Abu Saada, Professor of Political Science at Al-Azhar University, indicated during the project’s first lecture, which addressed “The Components of the Palestinian Political System,” the definition of the Palestinian political system, the problems it suffers from, and the problematic relationship between the Authority and the Organization as components of the Palestinian political system.
He explained that the Palestinian political system suffers from a series of crises in terms of its emergence and development, and that the legal environment carries within it major contradictions in terms of defining roles and distributing powers, which has created overlap in the work of the institutions forming the political system and produced the division that all Palestinians today are trying to overcome.
The meeting witnessed significant interaction from the youth, who at the end of the meeting called for the necessity of unifying youth efforts in order to wrest a real role for youth during the coming phase, and called on civil society institutions to contribute to building democratic and rights-based awareness among the youth segment so that they can rise up and demand their rights during the next stage.
Text © Al-Ray Palestinian Media Agency — archived here with attribution to the source. — Machine translation for archival reference. — Original source