The Participatory Development Program (PDP) is a five-year CIDA initiative managed by FIT and delivered in consortium with two other Canadian organizations: Alternatives and Ka:nen Our Children Our Future. The goal of the PDP is to support poverty reduction efforts and the realization of rights of marginalized groups, especially women, children and youth, in Egypt.

The Program’s purpose is to identify and strengthen the capacity of Egyptian organizations to effectively engage and represent their communities and to encourage open communication with the Government of Egypt and other development actors.
The Program is designed to achieve these results through three principal components:

• Management of three responsive funding facilities that will support capacity development of promising organizations through provision of training and technical assistance and financial support to certain project activities.
• Promotion of information sharing and knowledge generation through supporting the development of participatory research capacities, increasing organizations’ access to existing research, supporting new research initiatives and PDP’s own proactive research.
• Promotion of networking among Egyptian organizations and linkages between these organization and the Government of Egypt through the strengthening of networking and advocacy capacities and by bringing organizations, government and donors together to promote dialogue and joint action on gender equality, child protection and other rights-based issues.

PDP works to strengthen the ability of civil society organizations to organizations to effectively address development issues in their communities through approaches that emphasise participation, human rights, gender equality, and productive engagement with other actors, including government.  For this reason, activities are geared towards building capacity as required by individual organizations in the context of individual capacity development plan.  The needs of each organization vary, but possible areas for capacity development could include:

• gender sensitization
• participatory program development
• organizational and financial management
• strategic planning and organizational development
• rights-based management
• innovative programming approaches in the areas of gender equality, human rights, and child rights

FIT has used CIDA’s Gender Equality Strategy for Egypt to identify key gender equality results and the PDP will promote gender equality throughout delivery of all Program components. The PDP will also address such cross-cutting themes as child protection, institutional capacity building and environmental sustainability.

PDP’s vision is to support Egyptian organizations as they work to build more participatory, rights-based and gender sensitive approaches to address the development issues of marginalized groups, especially women, children and youth.