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Legal awareness and training project
Through this project, the Center aims to eliminate women's ignorance of their legal rights. This project mainly targets women due to the discrimination they face either at work or at home from members of their own families. This discrimination prevents women from exercising their rights and causes many problems that most women do not have the legal knowledge to solve easily. In addition to raising women's legal awareness and correcting misinformation, CEWLA also aims to inform women about the laws that discriminate against them and to push them to struggle against such laws.
The training project started in CEWLA in 1996 with a one-day session for women. The session aimed to make women aware of their political and legal rights. This was achieved with the help of some women who volunteered to educate the women in the Center.
These sessions continued until 1997, which was the start of CEWLA's first project of training and spreading legal consciousness. It was carried out in 8 governorates of Upper and Lower Egypt and lasted for a year. Through this project a legal training and awareness program was prepared for staff, leaders and members of various NGO's.
The training program:
The training program for legal awareness provided specific information on a number of laws connected directly to women's issues, such as the personal status law, the labor law and the discriminatory laws, especially the penal procedure law and the citizenship law.
It also covered women's status under the Egyptian Constitution and women's rights in inheritance. In addition, it gave the participants general information about laws and issues concerning services and support for women, such as social security and insurance and other types of personal documents.
In addition, CEWLA gave the trainees an introduction to movements for human rights and the international charters concerning women. All of this information was documented and distributed on the trainees so that it could be used as reference after the workshop.
In 1998 CEWLA expanded the training and legal awareness program to six more governorates in Upper and Lower Egypt in addition to the original eight.
In addition to the topics already mentioned, the training included other issues such as the social status of Christians. In the period from November 1998 until April 2001, 28 workshops for legal awareness were organized for illiterate women, community leaders and NGO staff, including kindergarten and literacy teachers.
Each program lasted seven days (four for NGO staff and three for community women).
The governorates where CEWLA carried out the project were:
1) Aswan
2) Menia
3) Sohag
4) Bani-Sweif
5) Kalyoubeya
6) Ismailia
7) Beheira
8) Sharkeya
9) North Sinai
10) Alexandria
11) Fayoum
12) Cairo
13) Giza
14) Quena
736 NGO staff and 431 community women participated in the project. Besides the main program many NGOs asked for daily training sessions covering issues like non-conventional marriage, citizenship, and the problems of Egyptian women married to foreigners.
In addition, the training sessions included information on obtaining personal documents and social insurance and rights under the personal status laws. These awareness sessions were held in NGOs and centers such as the Organization for Protecting the Environment, Bashayer Center, El-Saiyd organization and El-Darb El-Ahmar organization.
The educational levels of the trainees:
The educational levels of the NGO staff vary from Masters and Bachelor's degrees to completion of secondary school and some university to basic reading and writing. The community women were mostly illiterate with very little basic knowledge of reading and writing.
The training tools used in the workshops:
1) Discussion
2) Teamwork
3) Videos
4) Acting
5) Black boards
6) Exercises
The project's outcomes:
1) CEWLA encouraged many other NGO's to enter "legal awareness" onto their agendas.
2) The workshops raised awareness of the importance of personal documents.
3) Many staff who attended the awareness sessions encouraged their NGOs to establish a unit that helps women to obtain their personal documents. They realized that with the help of an identity card, women have more job opportunities and can get loans and access many other services more easily.
The importance of the training:
Participation in these training sessions reflected the strong need for legal knowledge for both groups of women who attended. This was obvious through their various questions.
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