CAROLINE BAZZI

Beirut – Resource Center for Gender Equality (ABAAD) is a Lebanon-based civil society organization aiming to achieve gender equality as an essential condition to sustainable social and economic development in the MENA region. Ghida Anani, the founder and director of the center, spoke to JINHA about challenges they faced in 2021. “First of all, we couldn’t complete our plans in a short time because there were limited resources in Lebanon. There are no specialists or experts to coordinate and carry out projects so we had difficulties in finding specialists and experts. The most prominent challenges we faced were the leaving of some of our team members due to health problems suffered by their family members or for moving to other countries. Another challenge we faced was the effects of the ongoing economic crisis in Lebanon. The cases of violence increased dramatically during the Covid-19 lockdowns and we had difficulties to provide support to victims of violence,” she said.

“We had significant achievements despite challenges”

Speaking about the problem due to the lack of specialists in the field of gender, she said, “There are a limited number of specialists in the field of gender and gender-based violence. Many of them left Lebanon to work in other countries. We have new members, who recently graduated, but they haven’t had the experience we need yet. We had significant achievements despite challenges. Last year, our goal was to maintain the sustainability of life-saving services for women. I think one of our achievements was providing specialized services for women whether in shelter centers or local community and safe centers.”

“Women began to talk about violence”

Giving information about the ABAAD’s campaign called “دايما وقتها (It’s always time to talk about your rights)”, Ghida Anani said, “We are proud of launching this campaign. We launched the campaign last year because women didn’t report violence they were subjected to due to economic conditions. The campaigns encouraged women to report and give priority to the issues affecting them. After we launched the campaign, women began to talk about violence again.”

“We want to develop more projects for women”

Ghida Anani also gave information about their projects in 2022. “We will continue to develop projects in order to empower women’s economy and provide support to them. One of the projects we worked on last year was to build a shelter for women who are subjected to violence and suffer from mental health problems. We started the project in cooperation with the Dutch government and in partnership with the Ministry of Public Health. But the money allocated for the project lost value. For this reason, we couldn’t carry out the project in 2020 and 2021. This project is still our priority. In 2022, perhaps we will collect more donations so that we can work on it in 2023.”