EACPE Program for Human Rights Education

:Introduction

     The Egyptian Association for Community Participation Enhancement has a program for Human Rights education in public schools targeting school children from 11-17 years of age. This program was initiated in 2004, with 20 schools, now reached 90, in coordination with the Ministry of Education. This program approach was

(a)    Knowledge and skills: for school children and teachers, for the purpose of learning about human rights and developing mechanisms for their protection, as well as acquiring skills to apply them in daily life;

(b)   Values, attitudes and behavior:  developing values and reinforcing attitudes and behavior which uphold human rights;

(c)   Action: taking action to defend and promote human rights.

 :The program objectives were

(a)   The strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms in the school system.

(b)   The full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity.

(c)   The promotion of understanding, tolerance, gender equality and friendship among all peers, nations, racial, national, ethnic, and religious groups.

(d)   The enabling of all persons to participate effectively in a free and democratic society governed by the rule of law;

The results of the program:

  1. Increase children's knowledge of the principles of human rights and the practical application of those principles in the targeted schools, through the activities of the school children on various issues.

2. Increased knowledge of school teachers in the principles of human rights and to activate their role in the education of pupils, those principles. Measurable through countless activities carried out by the teachers in this framework and also by increasing children's knowledge of those principles, and practical applications.

3. Increased knowledge of the families of the pupils the principles of human rights, and measured from the boards of parents and their interest to attend and volunteer activities that can play in this context and has already done a number of parents in different schools to give seminars to raise awareness about the main issues.

4. Facilitate administrative procedures by the Ministry of Education, to work with the targeted schools, and also to the Directorate of schools in different governates, as the Association is discussing with the ministry the possibility of adopting the idea and circulated nationwide.

5. Human rights clubs have been set up in targeted schools, and the implementation of activities aimed at the practice of human rights, and that through the discussion of problems and violations that the school children see with school administration and reached through the mechanisms of  creation by the children themselves to the solutions of those problems, And this has helped improve upon the school environment and strengthening the sense of citizenship, and faith in the ability to change (in the words of the children themselves)

6. Awards for the most active schools in relation to the activities of human rights clubs, six computers have been distributed, and a number of radiocassrttes and cameras, human rights clubs has been supported by books of human rights and other recourses had been conducted where children need.

7. Four summer camps for a number of 200 school children, exchanged ideas and experiences, and set up a charter of the work of human rights clubs in schools, as well as to assess their work during the previous year and plan the New Year.

8. The school children through human rights clubs that they manage by themselves set up huge wealth of volunteer work including design special web to their clubs, as well as huge numbers of research on various issues of human rights, and field visits to orphanages and rehabilitation centers for disabled children.... Etc...