As part of Maat for Peace's commitment to monitoring and promoting the implementation of the 2030 Agenda goals in Africa, and with a desire to deepen young people's understanding and strengthen their efforts to achieve SDG 12 on sustainable consumption and production, Maat Association, in cooperation with the "Be Inspired by Stories from Africa" Foundation, organized a training workshop on August 15, 2026. The workshop aimed to introduce the concepts of the circular economy and waste management, link environmental solutions to the local contexts of African countries, and build participants' capacity to effectively use storytelling to raise public awareness of these issues. It also aimed to facilitate effective communication with policymakers, funders, and civil society networks.
The workshop, which spanned the entire training day, included three different training sessions. The first session, held under the title "Introductory Overview of Global and Regional Environmental Efforts," focused on familiarizing participants with the timeline of global attention toward environmental and climate issues, and how this interest has been translated into a series of international initiatives and agreements aimed at organizing and ensuring the sustainability of global, regional, and national efforts. The session also emphasized reminding participants of the concept of the circular economy and its relation to waste management efforts toward achieving a Zero Waste threshold. Participants were introduced to the most prominent international mechanisms related to the involvement of NGOs and CSOs in international and regional efforts to monitor and accelerate the achievement of environmental goals linked to zero waste.
While the second session was titled "Storytelling between Knowledge and Implementation Mechanisms," during which the elements of impactful storytelling were reviewed, along with the most prominent diverse storytelling methods, and how to manage them in a way that enhances the ability to reach target audiences, donors, and policymakers. This was followed by the third and final session of the training workshop, titled "Laboratory for Crafting Inspiring Stories," which focused on a series of targeted practical exercises that encouraged participants to come up with inspiring stories inspired by the environmental activities and efforts made by their institutions. They then worked on crafting these stories according to the storytelling principles covered in the workshop, before moving on to write complete script models for their stories in preparation for filming them later and sharing them in the "Zero Waste" workshop stories bank.
It is worth mentioning that Maat organized the workshop with the participation of 26 participants from the actors and activists working in civil society organizations active in the field of the environment in Egypt, as part of the activities of the “Zero Waste: Stories Bank” project, as it is the Egyptian implementing partner of “Be Inspired by Stories in Africa” Foundation within the framework of its project aimed at empowering environmental actors within African communities in order to draw inspiration from stories to be the nucleus for creating an African future free of waste.
shortlink: https://safearabregion.org/en/?p=46794
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