Euro-Mediterranean Youth INVENTORY of ACTORS Middle East and North Africa

This Inventory is focused on identifying organisations that work with young people in Middle East and North African (MENA) region as well as the resources that they produce. The objective of the inventory is to catalogue the various youth organisations in the region as well as their projects, outputs and published resources in order to see the extent of community and social cohesion activities in relation to the benefit of young people and the region specific issues that they face. The United Nations definition of MENA region include the following countries; Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian Territory (referring to Arab populations living in Gaza and the West Bank), Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. These countries are the focus of this inventory. The main languages spoken are Arabic, French, English and Hebrew in Israel. It is unsurprising that there are many projects and organisations working for the benefit of young people in the MENA region considering the fact that the majority of the population are under the age of 25. What is also immediately obvious by looking at the theme of the projects, there is a stark contrast to the types of youth programmes being undertaken in the Europe. For example in countries like Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Israel, the main focuses of youth projects is on mediation and conflict resolution. The reasons for this are the political shifts in the region, war and humanitarian crises that have been affecting the region for the last decade. The inventory has been split into two distinct sections. The first section contains the details of projects and project-related web resources from international organisations that operate in MENA countries. This information has been formulated into tables which clearly indicate the organisation, the various countries in which they operate; names and general descriptions of regional projects; this is usually followed, where possible, by a document that has been produced as a result of the programme, i.e. Press Release, Evaluation or a Report, which contain more information. Further to this web-links to both the home page of the organisation as well as to the individual, relevant, project pages are included. With regards to the documents, the majority of materials contained within this inventory are in English, however where possible, efforts have been made to include materials in the common languages of MENA countries and also include multi-language reports and multiple versions of reports across all languages (i.e. Arabic, French and English) in instances where they are available. The second section of this inventory takes a regional approach to thematic grouping of youth organisations. These organisations are either national or they operate on a local grass roots level and the work that they do is directly relevant to the social, socio- economic and socio-political issues faced by young people in the specific locality. An example of this is the Sharek Youth Forum in Palestine that works with young Palestinians facing discrimination in Gaza and the West Bank. The structure of grouping sets out the geographic location of the organisations (country of base), their name and web-link and their overarching aim, followed by youth relevant projects with a general description of the organisation and links to specific project pages and documents. The majority of the organisations tend to be small with limited resources. This means that their capacity to create resources and documents in relation to their projects is also limited; however Page | 4 where reports have been found, they are listed below the corresponding project. Also in some cases there was lack of resources available online, particularly from countries such as Algeria and Yemen. This can be attributed to the very limited internet access and illiteracy due to political instability and poverty. There appears to be a very few local grassroots programmes and many organisations that were found had some link with larger supranational or governmental bodies. Again this can be attributed to political and economic factors. Whilst enquiring into the details of some grassroots organisations, it was often the case that they have no digital presence, but their names appeared in the evaluation efforts of larger organisations.