Palestinian Territories

Tamer Institute for Community Education
For many people, mastery the demands of literacy can be a difficult task.

It becomes even harder when your homeland is torn apart by war, oppression and poverty. In such situations, not only are schools damaged or destroyed, but curfews can affect the ability of students and teachers to actually attend any institutions that continue to stand.

This is the situation for the people of the Palestinian Territories. It is also against this background that the Tamer Institute for Community Education is trying to meet the need of the Palestinian people to learn and become productive.

Targeting young people
The Tamer Institute for Community Education is an educational non-government non-profit organisation, which was established in 1989. Its primary aim is to promote literacy by creating learning environments.

By encouraging reading, writing, creativity and cultural achievement among young people, Tamer is also working towards changing attitudes and behaviours.

Since more than 60% of the population in the West Bank and Gaza are aged between 5-19 years, Tamer seeks to develop young people’s leadership skills, life skills, public health issues and knowledge of their history to enable them to contribute to community building.

Different projects
The national reading campaign, with its library based activities is one of the best known projects run by Tamer.

Another project is run entirely by people aged 14 to 21, in which they write an entire weekly page of a newspaper, as well as a bimonthly supplement in Al Ayyam newspaper.

This allows young people to express their personal experiences, feelings and ideas through creative writing – which in turn acts a sort of documentary of events and experiences in the Palestinian territories. Other projects include the My First Book Competition and the Small Continent project.

Developing new ideas
Tamer also publishes the translated works of non-Palestinian authors, to ensure a greater sense of cultural understanding and exchange.

They have also started to run workshops for local writers and artists, to which foreign authors have also been invited, to encourage the development of indigenous Palestinian children’s literature.

They are looking at ways to challenge gender and disability stereotypes, and one approach taken has been for the writers to actually meet the children themselves in order to gain their views and ideas. Hopefully this will have a positive impact in the future.