Ready to kick-off project financed by the Australian Government’s Direct Aid Program aims at developing, introducing and disseminating innovative e-tool and public consultation formulas to enable local authorities, CSOs and representatives of disadvantaged youth to engage in micro-scale participatory decision-making schemes, focusing on safety, accessibility and inclusiveness of public space. The project objectives are to build leadership capacity of CSOs, local authorities and disadvantaged youth in targeted Tafilah municipality by promoting solution-oriented and tangible forms of interactions (charrette, Urban Action Lab) in the local public policy-making, to ensure equal opportunities and representation of disadvantaged youth in politics & and group’s participation in decision making process on local level and to restore trust in political actions and to improve their effectiveness by both – increasing all societal groups’ public participation in decision making process and by showing practical example of tangible civil initiative that can be multiplied and disseminated (change through community engagement).
Population of Talifah suffered considerable decrease (34000 to 32000 in 2013-2016), as lack of services, jobs and schools resulted in migration of youth to the nearby cities. Although there was several projects funded to prevent this phenomenon (Private Sector Development project, 3.85 mil), they aimed mainly at supporting sustainability of small businesses, without clear cut results. Municipality development plan for 2014-2018 highlights necessity of green areas and parks as the current one is packed, however three projects designed to serve this purpose have been delayed for 5 years so far, due to bureaucracy and lack of funds, leading to decreasing trust of local community in LA’s actions efficiency & accountability. As such we identified an urgent need for result-oriented, participatory, innovative solutions to overcome these obstacles. Regaining local community’s trust in policy making via CBOs & CSOs and newly elected LA to improve the public services, including participatory public space making (as joint and vital interest of all groups, disadvantaged and low income), can be achieved by providing an innovative consultation formulas (charrette, Life Lab) and e-tool to measure and evaluate the performance of municipality and CBOs, therefore concurrently addressing deficiency of civil society and lack of community’s influence on policy making on municipality level.
Project will be implemented in cooperation with the Jordanian NGO 3 Dimension Co For Training 3DC located in Amman.