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Home: Egypt
OAI courses: Create Your Activism Plan workshop and Activism Plan mentorship with Stephanie Vance
Vision: "Eliminating the marriage crisis among young men and women. Changing society's wrong beliefs about this topic."
Primary goal: "Getting young people to marry, and eliminating the marriage crisis."
Secondary goals: "Reducing the occurrence of sexual harassment and rape in society. Reducing the stress that falls on the shoulders of young people and their families."
Institutional channels to be used to achieve these goals: "Visual and broadcast media; civil society organizations."
Message: "A family = a better life"
Primary audience: Youth
Secondary audience: Fathers and mothers
Current activities: Preparing her campaign on youth marriage
About Omnia and her activism goals:
Omnia, age 29, has been a journalist at Al-Ahaly newspaper (the Egyptian Assembly Party paper) since 2000. She is the supervisor of the Youth section of the paper. She received a prize for journalistic human rights investigation from the Egyptian Organization for Penal Reform. She's also done research on the image of women in the local press, has studied the state of freedom and democracy from 2004 to 2007, and has taken an interest in workers and workers' unions. She is also the Cairo media secretary for the Assembly Party’s Women's Union.
As an activist, she is concerned about Egypt's "marriage crisis" -- the low marriage rates among youth due to the financial difficulties of getting married. In order to marry, grooms must obtain an apartment, furnish it, and provide a dowry and gifts for the bride. However, many young people cannot afford these expenses, and as they are unable to marry, they are trapped in a frustrating state of limbo between adolescence and adulthood, which has negative repercussions for society. Omnia's goal is to help get young people married.
What Omnia learned from her OAI experience:
"I definitely got lots of experience, the most important being the culture of e-learning and the exchange of different experiences between the trainer and participants. I also learned how to prepare for a campaign, how to define my goals and choose my allies, and how to reach my target audience. And I learned the importance of using modern media like the internet, cell phones, and how I can rely on them to reach a large number of people, without ignoring traditional media."
The actions Omnia has taken as a result of her OAI experience:
"I prepared a campaign to marry youth, but I haven't launched it yet, as the campaign will start through the internet. But I do implement what I learned on the section of Al-Ahaly newspaper that I'm in charge of (the Youth page): choosing ideas that affect [the audience's] lives, choosing a style that suits young people and reaches them easily, and carefully choosing supporting elements. I founded a Facebook group for the newspaper Youth section and post some topics there."