We spoke with Sarah Shouman, head of the youth unit at UNRWA in Lebanon, who spearheaded a country-wide project, Cash for Work, supported by Germany’s KfW, to help young Palestinians gain valuable work experience with local businesses and to help them in their first career steps. Before these placements started, Sarah introduced a series of Positive Self-Development Programmes to equip them with 21st-century, strength-based Positive Leadership tools.
Interview by Armin Forstner
Sarah, please tell us more about the KfW Cash for Work project you are currently running at UNRWA Lebanon.
The KFW Cash for Work youth project aims to provide short-term employment opportunities for a minimum of two months to 1000 Palestinian refugees between the ages of 18 and 24.
By providing employment opportunities, the aim is to contribute to the improvement of knowledge, the development of skills, and to prepare the youth for the professional world. As a result, this project is expected to facilitate their long-term integration into the labour market and thereby stabilise their livelihoods and their families by extension.
This project is implemented through our Employment Service Centres, where we offer job matching, counselling and training services to equip the youth with the right skills and ensure they are job-ready and able to compete in an already overstretched job market.
How do you bring Positive Leadership tools into the capacity-building parts of the programme?
In order to achieve the optimum results for this project, we had to address two challenges:
- Working to equip project staff with the skills we want young beneficiaries of the project to have, knowing that at least 70% of project staff are Palestinian refugees themselves.
- Create a programme for young job-seekers to ensure they have the right skill set to advance their careers and retain their jobs.
For the latter, we began with an assessment (questionnaires, surveys and focus group discussions) of key stakeholders (youth, employers, parents/families, and career guidance counsellors). According to employers, if the Palestinian refugee youth were able to find jobs, it was difficult for them to retain these jobs in the long term.
When we asked the employers what they saw as the barriers to the Palestinian refugee youths maintaining their jobs, the majority said that on paper the youth would tick all the right boxes when it came to qualifications, but lacked life skills and suffered from general apathy and a lack of motivation to succeed in the long term in the workplace.
This is not surprising considering that the refugee community faces many challenges including instability, lack of rights under Lebanese law, lack of resources, displacement and insecurity. This in turn does not promote a positive living environment and within the education system in Lebanon ‘rote learning’ is the main system of teaching, which also does not promote independent thinking in the learning environment. A refugee’s main aim is to survive any way they can, which sometimes brings about negative coping mechanisms.
So the challenge was not only to provide skills the Palestine refugees need in a work environment (time management, problem-solving, communication and teamwork), the larger challenge was to bring in positive leadership tools that build resilience and provide ways to transform the way young people learn and deal with adversities. This was done by changing their view of themselves, helping them learn mindful practices to understand who they are and equipping them with the skills and knowledge to effect the change they want to see in others.
With the help of Serrano 99, the team co-created an interactive life skill programme for young job seekers with positive leadership principles at the core of the training packages. These training programmes would occur in the induction phase of the job-matching process and the youth would be put through a series of such training programmes before they started their jobs and would be offered advice and coaching throughout their employment.
We often hear the term ‘life skills’ that are missing from traditional skills development. How does your Positive Development programme connect with that?
