Part 2 of The Interview with Mai E’leimat from Al Hayat Center for Civil Society Development
Interview conducted by WPP Staff
Mrs. Mai E'leimat is the Co-founder and the Head of Strategy and Research at Al-Hayat Center for Civil Society Development. Mrs. E’leimat has over 10 years of experience in research, project management and evaluation and strategy building. Her most recent researches and works included: The UN Women Research on Women and Violent Radicalization in Jordan; Monitoring Jordan’s first Action Plan for the Open Government Partnership; IRM report 2012-2013, and the second Action Plan; IRM report 2014-2015. She has also worked on the Evaluation of the National Strategy for the Jordan Higher Council for Affairs of Persons with Disabilities 2010-2015. Currently, she is leading two programs at Al-Hayat Center: “Monitoring Jordan National Integrity System Plan” and “Building Partnership among Religious Leaders (Imam’s and Waedat) to Counter Violent Extremism in Jordan”. Mrs. E'leimat holds a Bachelor’s degree in Law, and a Bachelor’s degree in Science & Education.
In this two-part interview with Mai E’leimat, Co-founder and the Head of Strategy and Research at Al-Hayat Center for Civil Society Development, she discusses her experiences working in Jordanian civil society. Al Hayat participated in WPP’s 2017 MENA Consultation “Powerful Agents of Change: Supporting Women’s Resilience for Prevention and Community Security”, and has been part of the WPP 2017 delegation to the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York. In this article, Mrs. E’leimat candidly opens up about the challenges in the funding landscape for civil society in Jordan, and how local NGO’s are coping. She also shares how the topics discussed during the MENA Consultation resonate with her work.
The increase in procedures one has to endure in order to receive/send fund harms everyone, and impacts the work you want to implement. For example, if you do not meet the donor’s deadlines because of the project delays caused by the government approval procedures, you risk losing their funding. Most donors do not anticipate these issues within their grant timelines. We face huge problems because of the time gap between the starting date of the project and the time it actually takes to get the necessary government approval for the project. For us, this is sometimes manageable, but it depends on each individual case. However, it becomes very hard for the smaller community organizations to start their projects on time.
As a medium-sized organization, we are able to use a lot of different channels to follow up on the approval process. We have lawyers, qualified staff, and good communication channels with the government, which helps us in trying to accelerate the procedures. Many community organizations lack the human resource capacity and these channels, and they do not know what to do. As a result, they then receive a denial of funds from the government.
At least for us, we can still keep up with the procedures, but it is not easy. One project took 1,5 year to be approved. By the time we got the approval, we were already finishing it. We just took the risk. Some of the community organizations, because of their size, don’t even send the government request for the project approvals; this is also risky. Some of them are afraid.
There are other constraints. For example, the Association Law states that if you want to have an assembly of (more than three) people you have to inform the local governor of your activity. However, it often happens that when you go to a hotel to reserve a space for your activity, they also ask for the approval of the governor. If you do not have it, they do not accept your reservation.
We know how to deal with this; we usually provide the hotel with the letter that we informed the governor, and then we go to the media. Because we have a good relationship with the media, we can manage to do that. However, some community organizations do not know their rights, and sometimes they are afraid. Complying with all these rules clashes with our rights as civil society. At this point, we do not even want to get the event approval, since the law only says we have to inform. If we now start waiting for the approval to come in, then we end up having to do that every time.
A key obstacle we face is the vagueness of the procedures, bylaws and laws concerning NGOs in Jordan. This provides more space for the government to use its authority to interfere with your work. For example, you don’t know when you have to keep your financial records, or for how long. There are no clear procedures on the process of approval of funds, no timelines at all. There are also many internal legislation complications.
All of this has a gendered impact, because of the fact that many women’s organizations are small organizations. For example, in 2016 we trained a network of women, so they would go out to encourage other women to vote for women candidates and participate in the elections. After the training, the trainees went back and organized follow-up sessions in their areas. Many of these women run their own community organizations, or volunteer in one. Some of them did not receive the approval of the governor to organize their local events. In response to this, one of the women decided to move the session to her house. It was her way of saying “you’re not allowing me to have this event at the community organization association”. If she had not come up with this solution, she would have had to stop her efforts. We are trying all we can to help them, because for a small organization, when they have no support, it becomes very difficult to overcome all the challenges.
Lack of understanding of the local context, is a major one. Some of the, what I call “middle-man”, organizations receive grants from big NGOs. They come here because their donors do not want to engage much in follow-up work at the local level, or they don’t have enough capacity, etc.
Some of these organizations are nonprofit and some are profit-based. These “middlemen” are good at reporting, monitoring and evaluation, creating work plans and communication strategies. They sometimes come to organizations like ours, letting us know that they have funding and are looking for organizations to implement the work on the ground. However, we feel they sometimes have their own way of working and lack local knowledge. This means you sometimes have to work hard to convince them to make adjustments to better fit the local context. Some of them are aware of this, they trust you, and will support you on every level.
Then there are those that come in and work directly on the ground, for which they hire staff and consultants. They make mistakes because they do not understand the local context. They just try to apply international concepts to the local context, without knowing the legal, economic, and social constraints. This means their projects sometimes fail.
When donors talk about their support for civil society in Jordan, they talk about the amounts of funding they are providing. But we have to ask ourselves, is the money going to the final beneficiaries or not? We are the very people, who are impacted by all the extra legislation and procedures. External organizations find their ways around it, which makes it easier for them to get the needed approval and come in and do the work. Unfortunately, some of these NGOs come for short-term interventions and then leave again. Especially around preventing violent extremism (PVE), it is almost all short-term interventions, because that is how the donors want it…
We work differently. As local organizations, we are thinking as a team, we always reflect on how we can provide continued support to those we work with. For example, our women’s program now has 150 women community leaders! Only 6 years ago, these women were ordinary community members. Now they have taken up local decision-making positions at the municipality level. The project of “Strengthen the Capacity of Rural Women and Female Municipal Members to Defend Women Rights & Participation in Jordan” has earned the Intercultural Achievement Award of 2017, as this project pursues the remarkable objective of providing a platform for intercultural dialogue between women from different backgrounds in Jordan and to empower Jordanian women from rural and municipal communities within the country as well as to raise awareness on women’s rights and participation.
Gaining the trust of local people is crucial when engaging in civil society work. It affects people’s trust when an organization just comes in and engages in short-term interventions. Moreover, it erodes the trust they have in us as well, because they think we will do the same thing! It ends up with the local community not trusting those who come in to tell them that they want to help. They just don’t believe that the intention is to create a sustainable approach. And they are judging the entire civil society in the same way, which puts more pressure on us - local organizations - to prove our credibility.
It also affects us on the level of our expenditures. "Middle-man" organizations, because they lack the popularity among the stakeholders they want to invite, create incentives to ensure participation in their events. For example, they are providing extremely high transportation fees, because they want to attract people. However, when we provide our participants with the local rate for transportation, we always provide the minimum amount needed to reach our events.
There is a big difference of course, and then we end up with participants asking us why we do not provide the same high rates. These organizations change the whole culture of participation by making the finances an incentive. This puts more pressure on us, and on our expenses. They also provide higher salaries for their staff, which also takes qualified staff away from our organizations. But then, when you send these same organizations your staff costs, they would tell you the amount is too high! You always have to defend your salary rate, for we want to keep good staff! These are just some of the problems we face with having these organizations working in the field.
It was amazing; we gained new information during the consultation. It introduced me to a new space that I didn’t know as a NGO. We always complain about shrinking space for civil society in Jordan. We have been struggling with all of these added pressures – ranging from bank procedures to government approval processes - but we never got an explanation why this is happening and what is driving this. It was very important for us to be able to link what we experience on a daily basis to international mechanisms and trends, and to find ways to use this knowledge in our advocacy work.
It is connected to our work on two levels. First, as an NGO, we are facing complications and challenges in relation to the approval of the transfer of funding, which is linked to governmental procedures that control NGOs’ project applications and funding. Second, we are working with a large platform of international NGOs in Jordan. We are implementing a Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) program, which, amongst others, focuses on working with NGOs to help them understand the rules and regulations in Jordan. At the same time, we also engage in advocacy towards reducing the impact of crippling countering terrorism financing (CTF) mechanisms. So, while we work to address the international challenges of security, we also find it important to ensure that the current security focus does not harm the work of CSOs.
Al Hayat Center for Civil Society Development is a non-governmental civil society organization established in 2006. Al Hayat aims to promote accountability, governance, public participation and tolerance in Jordan and the region within the framework of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, taking into consideration gender mainstreaming in public policy and action. Al Hayat works through two main programs: Accountability, Local Governance and Participation (RASED; The Observer) program and Countering Radicalization program. Al Hayat Center has more than 10 years of experience in the field of training and legal research and analysis.
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