Facilitators guidebook

Editorial

Whithin many contexts, and especially within a refugee camp, games, sports, arts, theatre, dancing, singing are usually seen as recreational activities made to help children to escape from the roughness of their lives for some hours.

We believed that those activities can be way more than just recreational. If they are run by trained educators with individual and collective educational goals they can contribute to reduce trauma, enable individual resilience and peace building, especially in the context of refugee camps.

That’s why we decided to launch a 3 year programme called « Animation Kurdistan » to experiment and frame this methodology in refugees and IDPs camps as well as youth centers of Kurdistan. It was run from September 2016 to August 2019 by the Danielle Mitterrand Foundation in partnership with the French organization Leo Lagrange Federation and the Kurdish Iraki organizations Civil Development Organization (CDO) and Public Aid Organization (PAO).

Inspired by the « popular education movement » (also referred as non formal education), 43 facilitators and 12 trainers from all the areas of north Irak and several local NGOs and youth centers received 1 year long term training and organized non formal education that benefited to more than 8000 children.

What we witnessed and assessed during those 3 years proved that this methodology when properly adapted and with educators well trained, can have, with very low means, significant impact on children’s well-being as well as on communities.

The booklets you are about to read are one of the main outcomes of this programme.

They aimed at providing support for any organizations and persons to organize educational and peace building activities for children as well as training frames for trainers and facilitators. Three booklets are available in English, Kurdish (Sorani) and Arabic. One for facilitators, one for trainers and the last one for trainers of trainers.

It is the fruit of months of practices in various environments as well as theoretical inputs provided by different educators from Irak, France and other parts of the world. We warmly thank them and sincerely hope it will be useful for you in your further activities. You can spread it as you like and feedbacks and suggestions are welcomed.

Table of Contents

Editorial

Introduction

Aim of this Toolkit

What is Non Formal Education?

Who is the NFE Facilitator?

• What should the NFE Facilitator know?
• What should the NFE Facilitator be able to do?
• What attitudes and values shout the NFE Facilitator adopt?
• Which behaviour should the NFE Facilitator demonstrate?
• Communication and posture
• Self-Assessment
• Professional code of the NFE Facilitator
• A concluding note by the author

Acknowledgements