Al-Jadeed Television’s Former Reporter Talks Women’s Rights at a LOST Forum in Hermel

In line with the scheduled programming of the Women’s Political Empowerment (WPE) project, LOST organized a forum on the topic of Women’s Rights in the Workplace starring the Lebanese journalist and Al-Jadeed Television (NEW TV) reporter Ogarit Dandash at the Hermel branch of LOST in the presence of WPE participants and LOST staff.

Welcoming participants and the guest speaker, the director of the Hermel branch of LOST Ahmad Alsaheli delivered the opening remarks of the forum and emphasized the importance of the latter in fostering dialogue among local women about their issues and in initiating a social movement to shape the social and political institutions of the region to resemble the ideal of a democratic society characterized by justice, liberty and opportunity. 

Dandash, who is a native of the city of Hermel in Northern Bekaa, spoke on the status of women in Lebanon. She insisted that despite women’s willingness to and aptitude for work, their immeasurable contributions to their families and to society and their deep-rooted yet institutionally repressed spirit of giving, women in the region continue to lack their basic civil rights and especially their rights to take an active role in the local marketplace and in public life.

After Dandash’s speech, participants engaged in a question and answer session with the guest speaker and focused on the topics of women’s rights and of women’s independence and productivity.

The forum is among the key elements of the WPE project which was launched in 2011 and aims at empowering 100 economically-disadvantaged and politically-disenfranchised women from the Baalbeck-Hermel region of the Republic of Lebanon politically via a curriculum encompassing education on the civil rights of women and practical experience organizing community projects on local governance matters. WPE is fully-funded by the government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands via its Embassy in Beirut.