Conflict Transformation in the Palestinian Areas

Background

The Palestinian areas have many challenges due to different factors like political hardships through generations, economical difficulties, instability, cultural challenges in view of women, different taboos, shame and honor and others. Among Palestinian children and youth, there is much violence and behavioural issues. Many times parents are themselves traumatized and don´t know how to deal with their children except by using violence. The governmental Palestinian school is the school for those who can not afford a private school, and they face many challenges, for example violence and hyperactivity, low motivation, sexual malpractices, superiority issues, limited involvement of parents among other issues. The Conflict Transformation in the Palestinian Areas (CTPA) has been working along side the Ministry of Education (MOE) to contribute towards a goal that is part of the Palestinian national strategy, but that the Palestinian government have not set aside any resources to achieve themselves. Each school has a counsellor, shared with another school. The CTPA was first training the counsellors from the Tulkarem area in a method called VD (Valuing Differences). Then, they also trained the councellors in Ramallah. They saw that there is a huge victim mentality among the teachers and the students, and people are not used to take responsibility for their own well being. So after training the school counsellors, CTPA started a project with 10 selected Ramallah schools called School Self Assessment. This program went parallel with training more counsellors from another area. The Shool Self Assessment program was a great success as headmasters, teachers, counsellors and students had to cooperate and identify the needs of the school. Then they together prioritized what they wanted to accomplish. The feedback and response from this process was amazingly positive. The right holders described feeling empowered, increased self worth and dignity. The CTPA also has focus on youth and on media. They have a weekly children´s program on the Palestinian national TV.

The CTPA puppets participate in the program, with a message built on the VD principles.

Purpose/objective

The project has the goal to implant more acceptance and support towards the idea of valuing differences, empowering Palestinians personally to build a healthy holistic life; mentally, socially, psychologically, physically and spiritually. Futher, it aims to equip and motivate to reconcile with those different than themselves – in and beyond their own community.

Methodology

The evaluation used a participatory approach in conducting the evaluation through engaging the different project stake holders throughout the different stages. Stage one: Desk review of relevant project documents. Stage two: Designing the evaluation tools and field based data collection. It was developed questionnaires to focus group sessions. These aimed to track social impact, satisfaction as well as prospects for future interventions/needs identification and identification of success stories. The total number of participants in the school focus groups is 28 (5 school principles, 3 teachers, 8 counsellors and 12 students). These were from Ramallah and Tulkarem, where the CTPA team has been working through the MOE. There was also two focus group sessions with youth teams from Zababdeh and Ramallah. 11 youth participated in these. There was also designed a semi structured interview form that aimed at responding to relevance, effectiveness, sustainability and prospects for future interventions/needs identification. These questions were used in conversation with the project partners and CTPA project leader and team. Stage three: Analysis and reporting.

Key findings

The CTPA have many open doors now and can achieve much if they have resources. The evaluation claims that it was strong indicators that the programs of CTPA have had lasting impact in the right holders, the right holders report that they have been equipped with tools that they will keep using. And the CTPA has taught other values than  traditional organizations do, like forgiveness and to appreciate/tolerate differences. It is likely that part of the CTPA materials will become part of the curriculum in the education of school counsellors. It is difficult to measure the impact of the TV program, but the channel says that they have more children calling the program after the CTPA puppets became part of it. And the channel would like the CTPA team to also make youth programs for them (this is a question of priority for the CTPA as the demand from different angles is high at this stage). The evaluators found open doors and huge appreciation of the team wherever they asked. It was also a key finding that CTPA, representing a Christian organization, was building bridges between Muslims and Christians.

Recommendations

The evaluators recommend that the project continues and expands. Further, the main points in the recommendations were:

• Have a more strategic targeting strategy - Upgrade the training package and tools
• Expand the tools targeting children at home - Allocate resources

Comments from the organisation, if any

Measuring results is always a challenge in this sort of work, especially also because there is no good statistics available in the MoE or in Palestine TV. For the next phase, the team will include a baseline plan in their PD, which will hopefully make it easier to evaluate more accurately in the next phase.