Baytna’s Trainings for Syrian University Students in Exile

September 8, 2022 - Baytna’s Outline program organizes regular capacity-building trainings for young Syrian men and women. When they finish their training, participants are awarded small grants to build their own teams and groups, extending the knowledge and skills they have gained and spreading them in the sphere of civil society empowerment and development.

The latest wave of trainings was held online, benefiting Syrian university students in Turkey and Lebanon. We hold one round of internships per year, with ten new interns joining each round. They also join the virtual workshops offered to grassroots organizations inside Syria, to build their collective capacities and so that they can build good relations with each other.

In the first round held last year, the teams organized advocacy campaigns in their universities to spread awareness about their conditions as refugees, especially in Lebanon where most Syrians still live in camps and can access only a bare minimum of services. These campaigns have begun to bear fruit, with some Lebanese students joining the campaigns and working on raising awareness with Syrian students.

While the campaigns have succeeded in spreading more awareness within the universities, difficulties were still faced in communicating with big organizations involved in Syrian affairs in Lebanon. In this year’s trainings, the Outline program has therefore given the same groups a new round of online trainings on communication skills, to help these students to improve their advocacy capacities and reach more stakeholders in Lebanon and Turkey.

Trainings so far this year have included project management and development, non-profit organizations management, HR management, financial management, strategic planning, MEAL, safety, security and risk management, the role of civil society, and social cohesion.

This short video highlights some of the feedback participating students have shared with us.