7amleh trains 1660 Palestinians in digital security in 2020 despite coronavirus pandemic.

7amleh - The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media trained 1660 Palestinians in 134 digital security and gender-sensitive digital security workshops throughout 2020. 

Despite the global coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdowns, closures of public institutions and stay-at-home orders, 7amleh increased their number of trainees from last year. Therefore, about half of the workshops were held virtually. Manal, one of our trainees from Ramallah, commenting on the switch to virtual training, said: "I hope that we can have these kind of workshops offline”. At the same time, the aforementioned coronavirus measures have increased the need for digital security to protect oneself.

"The practices that we gained in the digital security workshop are very important to learn especially in this period of the coronavirus, and the impact of it on our lives and the transformation to the digital world without knowing what kind of data or privacy we are compromising; we need to know more on how to protect our data and how to face the surveillance", explains Dima, another trainee from Gaza.

While another participant, Samaher Al-Khazindar, from Gaza, states: “The workshop exceeded my expectations and covered all topics and inquiries that were on my mind.” Aamer, from Ramallah, concluded after his training: "despite my previous knowledge in digital security, this workshop had new and special content". Adel, from Gaza, similarly stated that "this training added a lot for me", and expressed that he is "interested in more advanced training." Similarly to Mohammad, from Gaza, several other trainees voiced their wishes that 7amleh "create a series of workshops".     

In total, throughout 2020 7amleh trained more than 2500 Palestinians in digital security, reputation management, digital marketing, Wikipedia, and digital security for trainers.