WATANI International
9 May 2010
Premier Skills
“Premier Skills” is a partnership project between the British Council and the Premier Football League that uses the game as a tool to develop coaching skills and English language skills. Last month 30 premier coaches from six African countries took part.
The opening ceremony in Cairo was attended by several public figures in Egyptian, British, and international sport. Topping the list was Liverpool and England player John Barnes.
Egypt is the first African country to implement the first phase of the project, which aims mainly at providing opportunities for premier coaches from 18 to 35 years to develop their coaching skills. The coaching element of Premier Skills involves face-to-face training courses for young coaches that not only help develop their football coaching skills, but also teach them how to use football as a tool for skills and community development. The courses are led by former Premier League players and current Premier League coaches, and typically involve about 40 participants.
University in Gouna
A ceremony was held last month in the Red Sea resort of Gouna, where the Berlin University of Technology and Arts has opened one of its world branches. The ceremony was attended by Mrs Suzanne Mubarak who was granted the university’s honorary medal in appreciation of her efforts to promote culture and sciences, as well as Germany’s ambassador to Cairo, Michael Bock.
The university branch in Gouna will be established, staffed and equipped in cooperation with Orascom for Hotels and Development. The new branch will be launched in the academic year 2010/2011 with three Masters programmes to be studied in English: energy engineering; urban development; and water engineering.
Conserving Dahshur
A programme to achieve comprehensive community development in the area of Dahshur in Saqqara, Giza—Dahshur is a global heritage site famous for its pyramids, the remains of the ancient city of Memphis, and the famous Saqqara necropolis—was recently launched. Attending the event were Spain’s ambassador to Cairo Antonio Lopez Martinez, secretary-general of the Supreme Council for Antiquities Zahi Hawass, and the resident United Nations coordinator in Cairo James Rawley. The programme, which aims at protecting the 40,000-resident Dahshur area and its ecological system through an integral scheme of human and cultural development, is a joint effort of five UN organisations, the Spanish government, and four Egyptian State apparatuses. The development effort will depend in the major part on promoting a regular tourist influx to which the human development of the area will be tailored.
New pump station
The American Agency for Commerce and Development has given Egypt’s Ministry of Irrigation and Water Resources a USD274,000-grant to fund a feasibility study that will determine the technical requirements for building a new pumping station in the southern West Delta. Some two million West Delta residents are expected to benefit from the project.
German-Arabic translation
The 2009 German-Arabic Translators’ Award of the Goethe-Institut was announced late last month. A high-profile Arab-German jury honoured the Syrian writer Nabil Haffar and Hala Ghoneim of Egypt. The award, recently initiated by the Goethe-Institut, honours outstanding works in the field of translation of contemporary German literature into the Arabic language and promotes translation as an instrument of cultural understanding.
Haffar has translated many plays by prominent German authors into Arabic. The list includes works of Bertolt Brecht, Roland Schimmelpfennig and Heinar Kipphardt. Haffar received the Brothers Grimm translation prize in 1982, and in 2007 won the Critics’ Award of the International Theatre Festival in Damascus.
Ghoneim initially translated children’s books from English to Arabic. She teaches contemporary German literature as well as literary and journalistic translation in Cairo University.
Training midwives
Melanne Verveer, the US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, was recently in Alexandria to announce a new partnership between the US, Afghanistan and Egypt to train 30 Afghan midwives at the Suzanne Mubarak Regional Centre for Women’s Health and Development.
The two-week Safe Motherhood programme was held in Alexandria and included multimedia and hands-on instruction to enhance the knowledge and skills of Afghan nurses and midwives in order to enable them to provide better care to women throughout their child-bearing cycle. The programme seeks to diminish mortality rates of women before, during, and after pregnancy, as well as that of new-born children. The work of midwives is critical to the healthcare system of Afghanistan, where the maternal mortality ratio is the second highest in the world. Every 27 minutes a mother dies, and 77 per cent of maternal deaths are due to avoidable factors. The neonatal mortality ratio is also high, with 60 newborns out of every 1,000 dying in the first month of life.
The partnership is supported by the United States Agency for International Development in Afghanistan.
Poetry Jam, second edition
Following its huge success in 2009, Poetry Jam returned to Egypt for its second edition with three new-generation Egyptian poets and authors performing together with their counterparts from Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Paired up in Egyptian-European duos, the artists showed their talent in playing with words and language improvisation to entertain the audience with witty and satirical texts on the lawn of the Cairo Opera House; the Jesuit Cultural Centre in Alexandria; and the Cultural Palace in Sohag.
The second edition of Poetry Jam in Cairo, Alexandria and Sohag is presented by the Austrianculturalforum/cairo, the Goethe-Institut Egypt and the Swiss Embassy in Cairo, with the support of the German Embassy and Prohelvetia.