MENA Region
Danner contributes to the development of the global shelter community.
The Danish shelter movement started 40 years ago, which is longer than many other places in the world. We feel obliged to share our experience and knowledge, but we also learn from international cooperation with the home countries of some of the women, who stay at the Danner shelter.
Since 2011, Danner har worked with partners in the MENA region in order to strengthen the services offered to women and children survivors of domestic violence. Through exchange of experiences and professional cooperation, we have offered capacity development to individuals, shelters and organizations from Morocco, Tunisia, Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Syria.
Currently, we run a project under the Danish-Arab Partnership Programme (DAPP), which offers training to staff at shelters and related services in the four DAPP focus countries: Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt. The core principles of our international engagement - partnership approach, Human Rights Based Approach (HRBA) and experience-based learning - are all evident in this project.
Full analysis
Trainings are carried out in cooperation between a Danish and a local trainer, who both contribute their unique knowledge and experience to the training. We work very closely through the whole process, from developing the content of each training to evaluating the outcome. We practice a HRBA, meaning that we see the violence survivor as a rights holder, and build our activities on a full analysis of the causes and effects of domestic violence.
This approach is more efficient and sustainable than the traditional charity based approach, which is still practiced widely. Finally, all trainings are experience-based, which means that they take their starting point in the very context of the participants. This makes the training as relevant as possible, thus enhancing the impact of the intervention.
Danner has developed a comprehensive training manual, which comprises our years of experiences of working with survivors of domestic violence. The training manual serves as a handbook for our trainers and can be viewed here.
