Through details: from Craftsmanship to Entrepreneurship

Hello, I am Dhafer Amine, and today I will tell you about a collaboration that I experienced as a member of JCI Rades and that I shared with a dear friend Ashraquet Fakhri.

From a first glimpse, I and Ashraquet seem very different cultural actors, but in reality, there are a lot of similarities that we share. Both have a priority to provide development opportunities that empower young people to create positive change in our community and we are also influencing actors in the cultural field respectively in Tunisia and in Egypt, with an enormous desire to open up on a regional and international scale.

But respectively, we have differences which can be translated into a strong point. The major difference and that of specialization, Ashraquet aims to provide practical education in the field of heritage documentation in a specific approach while as a starter I lack expertise in the specific field of craftsmanship but I have good experience in organizing events.

The idea of the partnership between us start taking shape already from the Partner Forum in 2021 February, and after a series of meetings and consultations, we opted as a concept of the project to propose a rich and hands-on program of 4 days, where participants from related fields would be gathered in Tunisia and Egypt to acquire knowledge in the field of craft documentation, collecting narrative and innovative presentation and apply it by creating different prototypes as outputs. This idea is to generate other concepts of mini collaborative projects with the same objective as a documentary about the craft sector, hoping that many more other ideas may take place after this first collaborative project.

It is never possible to experience the subject without experiencing it, and the collaborative project has allowed me to see craftsmanship differently, live with craftspeople and share their difficulties, and learn more about the field. A fairly rich and unique domain but also abandoned and left by the young people of today.

Introducing the craft sector to young people through entrepreneurship presents an opportunity to improve the future of the sector, but is it enough to save it?