KHATWA Conference - The road to a better working environment
In December 2017, GFA successfully conducted the “KHATWA Conference - The Road to a Better Working Environment” as part of GIZ’s Labour Market Access Project (LMAP) in Egypt. KHATWA means “step” in Arabic and is the name given to the project’s approach to improve job quality. As the closing event for the 1st project phase, the KHATWA Conference aimed to showcase the success stories of two years of work in the three governorates of Port-Said, Ismailia and Suez. The event gave examples of the services the Federation of Economic Development Associations (FEDA) provides, such as Supervisory Skills Training (SST), and how it has improved lives of Egyptian people and positively affected Egyptian SMEs’ production levels. It also provided further insights into different topics and tools for improving job quality.
During the conference, the completed KHATWA job quality competition projects were announced. The KHATWA competition aims to raise awareness and motivate the management of the participating companies to identify areas of improvement, to implement measures, and to set-up structures ensuring the sustainability of these measures. SST success stories, job quality tools and social-innovation prototypes for improving job quality were presented at the conference. Furthermore, different storyboards were developed and presented the areas of improvement conducted by companies.
>> Storyboards (PDF, 9 MB)
Maha Al-Moaz, GFA team leader in Egypt, presented a Job Quality Checklist to the conference participants, which aims at encouraging companies in Egypt to conduct self-assessment in order to measure where they stand when it comes to job quality. This checklist was inspired by a German network for SMEs, Initiative New Quality of Work (INQA), which was visited by the project team during their study visit to Germany in 2015. Future steps to move forward were also discussed, such as: A network of companies in the new areas which will get the chance to win the 2nd phase of the KHATWA competition and creation of a national network for job quality.
Detailed information and photos can be found on the website of Federation of Economic Development Associations (FEDA).
