Yesterday, a group of international non-governmental organisations, the European Union, the British Council and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN), launched a new 100% NGO platform, the most important of its kind in Tunisia.
During a press conference open to the public, the partner organisations[1] presented the final draft of Jamaity.org portal, the first entity of its kind in Tunisia, gathering all information (still fragmented to-date) from different ministerial and international NGOs’ websites.
This portal is the outcome of a collaborative effort among different partners, designed to give the members of the portal an evolutionary character. Jamaity.org also aims to be a privileged space, mapping out available opportunities in terms of capacity-building and funding. This portal aims to make hierarchically-structured information accessible, both in terms of language (bilingual portal) and content.
The press conference was held in Tunis in the presence of His Excellency Hamish Cowell, the UK Ambassador; Michel Mouchiroud, Head of Civil Society to the European Union, Marc Schade-Poulsen, EMHRN Executive Director, Sadem Jebali, Project Manager at the British Council and Lamia Grar, Executive Director of the Arab Institute for Human Rights.
Jamaity.org aims to be the 100% pure NGO platform, to ease up access to information by a large diversity of Tunisia’s civil society actors.
The portal can be visited at Jamaity.org. It will be progressively developed in the coming months by a team that will work under EMHRN’s supervision.
More specifically, the Jamaity.org initiative entails:
- An online resource center: for digital documentation, sharing of experiences, publication of community projects outcomes – sorted by theme and geographical location, a database listing NGOs (addresses, contacts), a database of trainers by specialty and geographical location ;
- A geo-referenced database of NGO-generated projects: including all projects funded by international organisations, in cooperation with NGOs in Tunisia since January 2011;
- A geo-referenced database of Tunisian Civil Society: initially composed by an updated version of listings from founding members and donors operating in Tunisia, and supplemented later with info provided by newly coming NGOS via a membership-based system into the platform ;
- An interactive calendar of events related to civil society;
- A privileged space for NGOs displaying activities by the different partner organisations.
[1] The British Council in Tunisia, the EMHRN, the European Union (EU), the Institut Arabe des Droits de l’Homme (IADH), the Institut Français (IFT), the Dutch Embassy in Tunis and the Développement Sans Frontière Association (DSF)