More than thirty active and enthusiastic young people from eight Arab Southern Mediterranean countries gathered in Rabat yesterday, to participate in the first edition of the Training-of-Trainers (ToT) programme, launched by the EU-funded Med Culture programme.

The Training-of-Trainers programme aims to enrich participants’ skills, strengthen their abilities and develop new creative approaches for their trainings across different sectors within their respective countries.

The workshop covered cross-cutting themes, such as cultural entrepreneurship, intercultural dialogue, support to artists and to youth, media and journalism, architecture and urbanism as well as sustainable community development.

In the first two days, consecutive interactive sessions were offered in which participants also shared their experiences and main challenges. On the third day, participants were divided into three groups each tailored to answer their specific needs and concerns. And on the last day, an Open Space session took place in which the results of the work accomplished during the workshops were discussed, and where participants gave their suggestions and recommendations for the next edition of the Training-of-Trainers, scheduled to take place in the second half of the year.

Field visits to artistic centres and meetings with actors in the cultural field were also included in the programme, giving participants an overview of some important cultural operators in Rabat and how they manage to reach out through education, artistic performances and awareness campaigns.

Med Culture is an EU-funded regional programme that kicked off in February 2014 with the aim of sustaining the creation of institutional and social environments to support culture as a vector for freedom of expression and sustainable development. This should be accomplished by reinforcing the capacities of the public and private cultural sectors as vectors for democratisation, and economic and social development for societies in the Southern Mediterranean.

Med Culture is part of the regional programme “Media and culture for development in the Southern Mediterranean” which has been allocated a total budget of EUR 17 million over a four-year period, of which EUR 9 million is for the award of grants on a co-financing basis, and EUR 8 million for one capacity-development mechanism on media (Med Media) and one capacity development mechanism on culture (Med Culture).

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EU Neighbours South – Media, civil society and culture