The year 2018 marks the beginning of a new phase for the North-South Process for the Empowerment of Women (NSPEW) at the North-South Centre of the Council of Europe. While the former cycle contributed to reinforce the mutual agreement and raised awareness of the need to improve and protect women’s rights in the Euro-Mediterranean region, as from 2018, the North-South Centre will count on different partners and stakeholders to respond to a major concern: how to move from awareness to action?

The closing activity of the NSPEW in 2017 was already a prelude of what will come in 2018. The workshop on “strengthening capacities of women organisations” (Amman, Jordan, October 2017) allowed participants from the regional quadrilogue to formulate recommendations that emphasized sustainable actions and projects that could conduct the development of national strategies and reforms and include local specificities, contexts and realities to improve the situation in the region.

With this in mind, starting in 2018, the NSPEW will reinforce the capacities of women organisations to enhance cooperation between relevant stakeholders in the Southern Mediterranean region and in Europe, through a participatory human rights-based and bottom-up approach. The main milestone will be the 4^th NSPEW Conference in the summer of 2018, followed by a series of workshops in the Euro-Mediterranean region.

The North-South Centre will deploy its expertise in promoting North-South dialogue, partnership and solidarity by bringing together representatives of governments, national parliaments, local and regional authorities and civil society to address issues such as the lack of legal protection and assistance of women from violence, the lack of protection of refugee and asylum-seeking women or low female participation in public life and decision making processes. The different activities will encourage the exchange of expertise, best practices, and peer-learning.

The process will be accompanied and monitored by a North-South Centre Pool of Experts from the Southern Mediterranean region. The Pool of experts will benefit from a capacity building action to reinforce their knowledge and to acquire Council of Europe’s tools to promote gender equality in the Euro-Med region. They will meet regularly in the framework of the project’s activities, contributing to different workshops and to drafting a guide for promoting multilevel and multilateral cooperation through a bottom-up approach.

One examples of this successful collaborative work is the Arab draft law on protection of women victims of violence developed by the Lebanese organisation KAFA (Enough) Violence and Exploitation and the Algerian “Centre d’Information et de Documentation sur les Droits de l’Enfant et de la Femme” (CIDDEF), two members of the North-South Centre Pool of experts. You can find out more about this project in the next article of this newsletter.