Pal-Think launches its «Young Pens» radio programme

Pal-Think continues its role in strengthening the principles of democracy and human rights in Palestinian society, especially among youth, launching its radio programme “Young Pens” within the project “Preparing a Civic Intellectual (2)”, implemented by Pal-Think for Strategic Studies with funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). It aims to strengthen democratic values and human-rights concepts among young people in the Gaza Strip, create young leaders able to spread these values in their society, and enable them to play their part in decision-making.

The “Young Pens” programme, broadcast on the local Zaman radio, comes so that young men and women present the policy papers they produced during their time in the project. The young people received a training programme on rights and democratic concepts and in turn passed the knowledge and skills they gained to the rest of the youth groups across all governorates of the Gaza Strip through meetings and discussion sessions in cooperation with several partner institutions. During that period the young people also produced policy papers on issues concerning them and Palestinian society as a whole; the papers' principal titles addressed the media's role in political change, the work of civil-society institutions and the division's reflections, poverty among women in the Gaza Strip, the absence of gender justice, and the development of political practice among Palestinian youth.

In the programme's first episode, the paper titled “The development of civil-society institutions' work in the Gaza Strip and the division's reflections” was presented and discussed. The episode's guest was the young activist lawyer Ashraf Sukkar, a graduate of the “Civic Education” programme, who took part — under the supervision of a team of skilled trainers — in producing the paper. Sukkar spoke of its principal axes: the relation of civil-society institutions to democratic life in Palestine, and the framework through which civil-society institutions operate. He also spoke of the Palestinian division's effect on the Palestinian social fabric, those institutions' response to the challenges the division posed, and the role the institutions played in presenting proposals and initiatives to both sides of the division.

The episode also hosted the projects coordinator at Pal-Think, Sally al-Sammak, who spoke of Pal-Think and its role in empowering youth, affirming that young people hold priority in the institution's strategic goals and its concern to develop their capacities in several skills and to deepen their knowledge of the concepts of democracy and human rights. She noted that Pal-Think always works to connect young people with the outside world by hosting experts and ambassadors from other countries in discussion sessions where the young people speak of their causes and converse to draw on other peoples' experiences in the fields that develop society. Al-Sammak spoke of the Civic Education project's aims and its principal outputs, especially the policy papers. In the context of the paper's content she spoke of civil-society institutions' role in Palestinian political and societal life, the developmental services the institutions offer society toward its development, the institutions' role in overseeing the government bodies and applying integrity and transparency, their standing as the foremost defenders of freedoms and rights, and the strengthening of relations between citizen and government. She also spoke of the challenges facing civil-society institutions and the political division's effect on the reality of their work — harmed by the political conflicts and the tightening of administrative and financial procedures conditioned on the requirements of the two governments in Gaza and Ramallah, in addition to the role of the occupation, which obstructs the institutions' work and blocks supportive funding opportunities.

At the episode's close, al-Sammak took up the principal proposals that would help confront those challenges — foremost the importance of opening the door of dialogue between civil society on one side and the government body and the factions on the other, and unifying efforts to unshackle the agenda of civil-society institutions so it returns to its national course. She affirmed the necessity of intensifying efforts to empower youth, always and in every field, to work on developing society.