MENA Middle East and North Africa (Egypt):
Location: Maadi Victory College, Cairo
Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending a baseball match here in Egypt in the company of representatives of the Japanese community, the Japanese Embassy and JICA. It was a wonderful day despite the tremendous heat. The Japanese Ambassador was present, and ICA MENA was invited to promote handicraft products produced by artisans in poor communities. We were able to sell these traditional crafts to spectators during the game. In addition to ICA MENA, there were representatives from other NGO's also working to promote fair trade handicrafts. The Japanese have been very supportive in these efforts, and we currently have two volunteers from Japan working with us on this project. We had a very productive day, beginning at 10am and finishing at 4.30pm. Afterwards, we went for pizza to celebrate the day’s achievements and to thank the volunteers for their efforts. It is surely a sign of how integrated our world has become when Japanese volunteers in Egypt are watching an American sport, helping to promote traditional Egyptian handicrafts, and celebrating their efforts with Italian food.
Assem Kamal assemkml@gmail.com
PERU:
Location: Azpitia-Lima
The staff completed another one week Promoters School in Azpitia this week, and sent another 30 great women back to Chincha to initiate women's micro-industries in their neighborhoods. This is the fourth group of a total of 15 over the next three years included in a grant from the Hanns Seidel Foundation in Germany.
The first three groups have had quite dramatic results in generating new businesses which now number several hundred, making for a lot of excitement in the neighborhoods of Chincha as they still struggle to recover from the earthquake of almost two years ago.
This week, the Founders leadership group of ICA-Peru, spent a half day working on future program needs and decided to hire two more young 25-35 year old staff members to start another generation of staff for our service to Peru. We were then presented with an immediate applicant who seems like a wonderful addition to the staff to support our rapidly growing Implementation work in the communities.
This will be the first time that we have attempted to hire entirely new staff, and we will now have to take seriously the need to train our staff. To that end we also invited a colleague to join our staff for that role and others. The staff are very excited about the great many challenges that lie ahead.
Staff admin@ica-peru.org
ICAI:
Location: Montréal
This past week Lambert traveled to Edmonton to attend the annual general meeting of the Canadian Environmental Network as a representative of the steering committee of the International Caucus. He had the opportunity to meet with representatives from diverse environmental groups across Canada, and discuss strategies for enhancing the work of the International Program. There is much enthusiasm among Canadian environmental groups for enhancing their impact internationally and for building international partnerships with organizations such as ICA International.
Michael and Lambert met with a representative from Tourism Montreal, which is an organization that helps bring international events to the city. They are excited about ICA International’s presence in Montreal and are very keen to work with us; they discussed the various ways that they could support a meeting or conference, including logistical support, participant subsidies and publicity.
We continued to build support for the global leadership program for schools, meeting with two separate supporters, each with long experience in working on innovative education programs. Michael worked closely with a number of ICAs to help them prepare submissions to the UN Habitat Youth Opportunities Fund in support of youth-led development in urban areas.
Staff info@ica-international .org
