Empowerment of Civil Society

However, in local communities, civil society organizations are often organizations that provide services to people at the village level and generally lack the capacity to deal with longer-term development goals or mobilize community members in actions that can assist the state in its development efforts. These limitations often hinder their participation at the national level, while even at the local level with their weak management capacities, they find themselves excluded from the local development processes.

Moreover, as most NGOs are donor-dependent, they eventually become detached from their surrounding community and accordingly fail in realizing and addressing the priorities of their communities in a way that affects their credibility and trust within their communities. Furthermore, they often compete for donor funds, hindering any prospects for collaboration between them, especially since most of domestic NGOs lack proper structures and do not have clear goals.

In that context, the project works with groups of selected NGOs in upper Egypt to enhance their collaboration, structures, capacities and methodological engagement to address the social and economic challenges limiting educational opportunities for children from marginalized and poor families, especially girls, in rural Upper Egypt.

Global warming, water shortages and the increase in agricultural pests are also expected to negatively impact plant production and livestock.

It is therefore necessary that the next generation of Egypt's youth will be a conscious generation with a deeper understanding of environmental sciences and environmental sustainability as a valuable opportunity to bridge the gap between theoretical education and real world developments. In fact, there is a significant urgency of changing mindsets as well as behaviors not only to act in face of climate change, but to find solutions together for mitigation and adaptation and also take this opportunity to leverage social transformations for inclusive development. In this way, young people must be empowered with environmental knowledge that enables them to consolidate the values ​​of environmental sustainability and sustainable development, the most important of which is the irrational consumption of natural resources (including air, land, water and energy).

The main purpose of the project is educating young students in preparatory and secondary levels in the fundamentals of environmental sustainability and raising their awareness regarding climate change and its negative impact through conducting a series of workshops aiming for increasing environmental awareness in addressing complex environmental issues and correcting misconceptions and wrong consumption customs. Besides, it also aims for spreading awareness about the environmental complexities in Egypt and the sense of responsibility towards environmental impact locally and globally, through focusing on environmental sciences and sustainability to stimulate study and future work in the field and enable teachers to apply the environmental education curriculum.