Skurakaa 2 (Partners 2) Project

Civic clubs have been established in participating universities in 7 regions across the country: Cairo, Alexandria, Minya, Mansoura, Luxor, Aswan, and Ismaeliyah. Before beginning the media production training, the clubs teach students about the importance of civic involvement in their communities. The students in the clubs are then trained in newspaper, radio, and television production. Following that, the students select a local community issue, gather information, and produce an article, radio, or television insert to publicise their findings and offer possible solutions to the problems highlighted.

Some of the issues that the students investigated are:

• Unemployment among Egyptian youth: There are between 3 to 5 million unemployed people in Egypt. This issue especially affects university students, who find it hard to get a job upon graduation.
• Sexual harassment in Egypt: This is a major social problem in Egypt, where women are regularly harassed on the street yet face social pressure not to report the incidents to the police.
• The gap between the Egyptian educational curriculum and the skills needed in the job market: College graduates enter the work force to find that the skills they learned in school do not match the requirements of the job market.
• The rapid population increase in Egypt and its effect on the economy: Cultural traditions, lack of awareness, and poverty encourage large families, but with overpopulated cities and dwindling resources, this is becoming a bigger problem.
• Causes and effects of illiteracy in Egypt: Early drop-out rates among middle school and high school students as well as the lack of government support for literacy programmes among adults mean that illiteracy rates in Egypt are high.
• Teaching practices at the university level: Students find that professors often rely on the use of authority instead of dialogue and discussion.
• The traffic problem in Cairo: Cairo is one of the most overcrowded cities in the world. Cairo residents experience health problems such as respiratory diseases and cancer due to the density of traffic and weak fuel emission standards.
• Youth ambivalence about political action within the university: Political action is popular among university students in Egypt; however, the government strictly controls the level of participation. This fact, among others, reduces student participation in political clubs on campus.

In addition to participating in the citizenship clubs, the students go online to continue their discussions of civic involvement on Facebook. A Facebook group created by university students in Alexandria has almost 200 members and features debates on various topics related to citizenship.

Citizenship, Rights, Women, Education, Population

The Skurakaa 2 project builds on an earlier project by Internews and the Center for Civic Education that trained 300 Egyptian teachers and 2200 students ages 11-18 in media and civic education.