The organizing authority: Supreme Council for Family Affairs

Date: 29^th -30^th September 2004

First: Symposium's aims and axes:

The symposium aims at knowing the characteristics of the family contemporary and constructive changes that came up, challenges that face it for the sake of enabling and including it in the development and outlooking its future, the symposium had 5 axes:

1.      The Characteristics of Qatari Family.

2.      Political participation.

3.      Building the abilities.

4.      The legal aspect.

5.      The economic aspect.

Second: Work papers:

1.      The Characteristics of the contemporary Qatari family, Dr. Kalthem Al-Ghanem, Sociology – Qatar University.

2.      Family and political participation, Dr. Ali Abdulhadi Al-Shawi, Sociology – Qatar University.

3.      The legal protection of the family, Mr. Khaled bin Mohd bin Abdullah Al-Attiya, the president of National Committee of Human Rights – Qatar.

4.      Contemporary family under the contemporary challenges, family and building the abilities, Dr. Asma Khalifa Al-Attiya, Sociology- Qatar University.

5.      Economics, work and unemployment and its impacts upon the family, Dr. Saleh Al-Nabt, the General-Secretariat of the Planning Council – Qatar. 

Recommendations:

1.    Social, local, regional and international challenges that Qatari family face

·        The need of spreading out the awareness in the Qatari family regarding the political upbringing through educating the family especially the parents and planting the national principles, nationalization, loyalty and protecting them from some of the political ideas that may push them to political deviancy. This will be true by means of family democracy which teaches them the language of dialogue, forgiveness and equality.

·        Achieving the equalization of opportunities among the Qatari families whether the social, economic and educational opportunities to achieve the equalization in the size of the political participation.

·         Reason of the associations meaning relying on the principle of equalization and not the social or ethnical race. It is the family's major responsibility of achieving the social equality and justice between tribes because this will decrease the tension instead of having the conflict and competition that occur for the sake of reaching the political and social positions.

·        Building the civil society associations like the unions, professional societies, social and political associations that have administrative and financial independency, and its members are been elected.

·        Seeking for the sake of building a society that stands on inclusion, interaction through establishing mixed areas of all Qatari families and tribes to decrease the isolation and the non interaction between the individuals that increase the creation of social distance which causes no forgiveness and separation. This in turn will leads to producing secondary cultures and difference in the national identity.

·         Providing more opportunities for the Qatari women to work and get in various areas.

·         Caring about the curricula of education to plant the concept of social upbringing and human values. 

·         Finding programs addressing families to train them on the style of modern education in addition to the need of preparing courses for the family and the people working on the programs of family.

2.     Legal and legislative aspect

·         Suggesting expending an allowance for each child estimated by 500 QR to encourage the family to increase birth and modifying the population structure and decreasing the economics burdens of the family.

·         Asking for equalization in allowance between males and females.

·         The need of a legislative intervening to give the mother an accompaniment vacation for an inside patient. 

·         The Media Unit at the Supreme Council for family affairs should display short articles in the daily newspapers regarding the individuals' legal protection by the legal experts in the Council.

·         Provoking the State to join the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Woman (CEDAW) and other international conventions.

·         The need of preparing a special central database for the domestic violence.

·         Caring for training and awareness of responsible people in the competent authorities regarding the domestic violence.

3.    Economic challenges, work, unemployment and building ability

·         Clarifying the systems and laws of work.

·         Modifying the culture of the society about the different area of work specially the professional area with a directed media support.

·         Developing the system of wages and relating it to the private sector (finding a general policy of the wages).

·         Developing the support of small projects.

·         Encouraging the youth to go for the new jobs specially the technical jobs.

·         Finding an association to direct the Qataris economically through studying the benefit and the local market.

·         Encouraging the issue investing the savings.

·         Rethinking about investing power that has been retired earlier or was forced to retire.

·         The Social Solidarity law should include the low income retired groups.     

·         Reviewing the educational curriculum to meet the needs of globalization market.

·         Encouraging the youth to join the technical and technological education through the policies of professional nurture to promote the values of the technical work and hand craft.

·         Including the educational curricula and mass media the styles of promoting the ways of scientific thinking.

·        Supervising the educational curricula in the private schools and directing it towards promoting the established national values.