Khabar Khair (Only Good news) – Ruqiyah Danana

Crises, conflict, various tragedies, images and voices written by the observers of the Yemeni affairs from abroad, but in the midst of this bleak scene, there is a noticeable tendency for Yemeni youth and women to attend and participate in the training and rehabilitation programs in the fields of development, media, conflict resolution, and peace.
This orientation revealed by the youth and women is in line with the sector’s desire to present its own perspective on solving the Yemeni crisis, which will only come about through the youth and women’s owning the tools that achieve a clear central vision for what they want to achieve at the personal and societal level.

Civil society organizations, associations and Yemeni institutions play a major role in this field, as they harness their capabilities and expertise in order to create a perceptive and ambient awareness of the issues of Yemeni society and to find common ground for the divergent viewpoints. On the other hand, they offer programs that target the trainee and bring him close to the global humanitarian issues. In order to make the trained staff qualified, most of these centers and organizations sought to subject their staff to intensive training courses, to ensure successful training opportunity for the trainers later.

Asim Al-Ashari (Director of the Research and Public Policies at the Resonate Foundation Yemen) said, “The Resonate Foundation has implemented 24 projects during the past year, which included many activities and events, most of which targeted Yemeni youth, males and females”.

Al-Ashari added, “The Foundation targeted in its programs the members of bodies, entities and political parties, where the total of the targeted governorates reached 14 Yemeni governorates, while the total number of direct targets for these projects was 2299 beneficiaries of whom 1756 were young men, compared to 756 females.

Al-Ashari confirmed that the number of indirect beneficiaries of these programs amounted to 19,533 people.

Regarding the development issues, the Resonate Foundation, thanks to the “Musahamati” (my contribution) project, targeted 160 young people, which it trained in the study of the community’s needs and gender, communication and leadership, as well as conflict resolution and governance (monitoring the activities of the institution and those in charge of it).

Al-Ashari also stressed on the importance of integrating young people into development initiatives by bringing them to the field in order to be able to manage development projects and work to motivate the community to participate in the development field.

Saydeh Ahmed Musaed (administrator at the SOS for Training and Rehabilitation Center) confirmed that many young people who underwent the training have changed their views in relation to the issues on which the training courses were presented, and which more than 2000 trainees received at the SOS Center during the past year.

Saydeh added that vocational training for young people helps them raise the level of productivity with regard to their actual or future private projects, which later reflects positively on improving their own income.

Talking about the quality of these training programs depends primarily on measuring the rate of actual verification of the response on the ground and not in the social media or in the various media, which cannot be subjected to a comprehensive study.

The statistics provided by the organizations supervising the training regarding the number of trainees and the projects they were able to achieve only provide a limited angle on the extent of achieving the total benefit of these training courses and their long-term feasibility, especially since the number of training courses offered to the trainee is often tainted by repetition.