المشروع والمشاركون

About

Thanks to the opportunities offered by the transformation funds of the German Foreign Ministry the activities in the framework of NECE (Networking European Citizenship) were made accessible for participants from North Africa. The 2012 annual NECE Conference in Cordoba provided the framework to discuss in a timely manner the recent developments in North Africa after the uprisings and the need to reinvent Europe after the financial and economic crisis. The topics were the challenges of participation and what role to citizenship education, addressing the problems with participants from both sides of the Mediterranean (see online documantation here). 

60 speakers and participants from Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia attended the convening, with a delegation of Egyptian participants, organised by the Goethe Institute Cairo. The group had previously visited German organisations working in the field of citizenship education in the run-up to NECE Cordoba. within the conference a NECE Focus Group called “Exchange between Europe and North Africa” was founded to support the establishment of a sustainable and long-term platform for exchange, transfer of knowledge and co-operation between members of the NECE network from both sides of Mare nostrum[1]. 

Since 2012 the NECE convenings are attended by an increasing number of participants from the southern Mediterranean. Inspired by the Cordoba Conference, the Goethe Institute in Cairo, together with Tahrir Lounge Cairo and with the Hans-Seidel Foundation office in Egypt, supported by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) organised the first of its kind Civic Education Conference in Egypt (CEC) at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in December 2013 . Members of the Focus group actively contributed to the set-up and took part as speakers and discussants. 

For the sake of sustainability, the focus group devoted work and energy to the creation of an online platform that is in the process of publishing country profiles, dedicated to citizenship education in the respective countries across the Mediterranean. Against that background a revision and extension of the NECE publication “The Making of Citizens in Europe” is in the making. In addition, a project dedicated to an extensive mapping of citizenship education in Egypt has been launched by the Danish Egyptian Dialogue Institute (DEDI). 

As a side-event to the CEC convening in Alexandria in 2013, a meeting was held that initiated a joint bi-lingual publication project on citizenship education as a core activity of the focus group. The 2014 meeting of the group that took place on the margins of the NECE Vienna conference was dedicated to further elaborating the project idea. The time in between meetings has been dedicated to selecting authors, drafting guidelines and sending out call for proposals. The meeting of the editorial team took place in Tunis in May 2015 and resulted in revision, editing and publishing of the submitted articles, including the web-project. Being a work in progress, the platform is going to grow both in terms of country profiles and in thematic areas addressed. 

The Editorial Team

• Ali, Moez, Union des Tunisiens Indépendants pour la Liberté (UTIL)
• Aly, Shereen, Independent Researcher
• Arram, Shahdan, The Danish Egyptian Dialogue Institue (DEDI)
• Ata, Menna Talla Reda Mohamed Mahmoud, Egyptian Youth Federation / Ambassadors for Dialogue
• Bakhach, Abdelghani, Youth Association for Culture and Development
• Becker, Gabriele, Goethe-Institut Kairo
• Corbel, Nelly, Lazord Foundation for Civic Leadership
• El-Khattam, Youmna, Independent Researcher
• Gaber, Rana, Egyptian Youth Federation / Ambassadors for Dialogue
• Grüne, Petra, Federal Agency for Civic Education
• Mahmoud, Elhossien, Hayaty NGO
• Scheier, Sascha, Federal Agency for Civic Education
• Slavkova, Louisa, Sofia Platform – Bridging Europe and the Middle East