Second Chance Education project

Funded by UN Women.

This project aims to promote vocational and life skills for women, empowering them to utilize their experiences, developing their work-readiness, enhancing creativity, innovation and productivity, and supporting the trend towards employment and self-employment in order to reduce the unemployment rate among vulnerable women in Jordan. The other core element of the project includes the empowerment of women to identify social challenges in their communities and respond to them, through encouraging self-development, taking initiatives, bearing responsibility and risks, thus creating a generation of pioneers who are productive and creative and turn their entrepreneurial ideas into productive projects that contribute to the development of the national economy. This initiative also aims to promote processes of creative research and innovation that must be the base of the future in Jordan.

The project also aims to strengthen the capacity of civil society by working directly with CBOs and informal groups (women’s committees), to act as the catalyst for change at a local level, by helping women to build and acquire the needed skills, knowledge and access to financial and non-financial services, improving the institutional environment, and assisting women in their ability to make and act upon decisions in order to benefit from economic growth. Working through these community-based networks will ensure sustainability long after the program is completed. To achieve this, the project is supporting and building the capacity of 6 MOSD centers (Oasis centers) in Madaba, Ajloun, Karak, Tafila, Ma’an and South-east Amman) and two Syrian refugee camps (Azraq and Zaatari).

Activities take place inside UN Women’s Oasis Centers within each of the locations, and integrated within the comprehensive services provided in the center. In host communities, the Oasis Centers are run out of already established community centers owned and run by the Ministry of Social Development, and in the camps, UN Women has established Oasis Centers where activities take place.
Our vision is to offer women the opportunity to gain practical, relevant skills that support them in earning a sustainable livelihood. Training content, which be offered primarily through an e-learning platform in a blended approach, will be developed for each of the geographic areas depending on the market needs, but entrepreneurship will be a cross-cutting component of the entire program. Key areas of entrepreneurship that will be developed include:

• Building personal attributes and cross-cutting skills that form the basis of an entrepreneurial mindset and behavior (creativity, sense of initiative, risk acceptance, self-confidence, independence, etc.); 
• Raising women’s awareness of about self-employment and entrepreneurship as possible career options;
• Using practice-based methods, where women are involved in project work and/or in community activities (linking them with the business world and with the community);
• Providing basic business skills for self-employment or self-management, and knowledge of how to start and develop a commercial or social venture successfully.
  Linking this project to the already established and successful community-based organizations ensures that its effect will continue to be felt long after the project has been completed.