Telling the Story

The CIDA-Egypt Program is committed to strengthening citizen participation and institutional capacities of civil society, public institutions and businesses. This is being done through the Cross-cutting Theme: Active Citizenship Engagement for Good Governance (ACE).  The ACE Strategy has been developed to help mobilize talents, energies and resources of citizens to advance active citizenship and good governance. It is a call to action… a call for new roles, opportunities and endeavors in civic action and civic responsibility.  

Within this context, and in addition to other initiatives aiming at achieving the Strategy’s objectives, the “Telling the Story” series of meetings were created as a ‘hub’ for participants from different CIDA projects, partner organizations and other institutions to come together to share their experiences and to network with a focus on active citizenship and good governance.

We have stories told by two civil society organizations (CSOs), Wadi Environment Science Center (WESC) and SAWA Group.  WESC and SAWA presented their experience of working with their communities to affect change using the ACE Strategy as a framework for their various pursuits.  WESC members told numerous stories of empowerment. SAWA, using art as the mechanism to affect change, described how they drew on ACE to inspire a social movement that started in a garage and spread to entire communities.

Another story about creating a Values Based Organization (VBO) was told by a Senior Program Manager at Vodafone Egypt.  He spoke about how employees in a large multi-national business made their voices heard, and how Vodafone has finally integrated corporate values into their work to become a VBO.  

The fourth story was by a group from the Cairo Economic Livelihoods Program (CELP), a CIDA-funded project implemented by the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN). The group staged their experience on how they used the ACE Entry Points to develop a framework for integrating all four CIDA Cross-cutting Themes into their work. They explained how, in the beginning, the concepts of the Strategy seemed somewhat complex but after receiving coaching and working with other CIDA projects, they became a logical tool to use in framing their activities and achieving their goals.     

The fifth story in the series was by young citizens from two youth organizations: Oyoon Group and Jasmart Team.  Oyoon and Jasmart have been working with the ACE Team for some time. Their task was to simplify the Strategy’s entry points and concepts to appeal to young Egyptians as they are the natural and priority constituency for the promotion of active citizenship.