RIYADH, 23 February 2007 — The British Council is expanding its women’s center to cope with the growing demand for its courses that are designed to help them face challenges in life and also improve their prospects in the employment market.
Jim Scarth, representative of the British Council in Saudi Arabia, told Arab News that the program, known as “Springboard,” was tailored to meet the needs of Saudi women of different walks of life. Its main thrust was to enable them to boost their communication skills, whether on the home or the job front.
He was speaking to Arab News on the sidelines of a seminar on “Cross-Culture Communication” organized under the umbrella of the Saudi-British Alumni Association.
A large number of Saudi alumni of British universities were also present.
Scarth said the “Springboard” program, currently in operation in Riyadh, Jeddah and the Eastern Province, has turned out to be a huge success. “We have now extended it to Madinah. The program is available both in English and Arabic. However, going by the response, it is now only in Arabic,” he observed.
Elaborating on his comments, Karen Daly-Gheradi, assistant director of the British Council, said some 350 women in the three provinces are taking courses on how to face stress in life through effective communication.
“We also teach them self-development courses and also those geared to the needs of the employment market. The candidates include doctors, housewives and businesswomen,” she said.
She pointed out that following the success achieved by the women’s centers in the three provinces, the Springboard course has now been extended to Madinah, where they organized four consecutive workshops attended by women from different backgrounds. These programs helped the participants gain confidence in rising to the challenges of modern life, Karen observed.
In his presentation on “Multicultural Communication,” Hisham Malaika, general manager of Dar Al-Riyadh, explained the importance of the concept in the context of globalization. He said that with the winds of change blowing across the world, the only way to adapt oneself to the changes was through a paradigm shift.
Hisham, who did his MBA in architecture at the Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University, said the need for a paradigm shift had assumed a new dimension, since globalization had broken down barriers creating a multicultural environment at the work place.
Failure to recognize these changes and act accordingly could prove costly in the long run, he said, citing how some mergers and alliances ran aground in the absence of a paradigm shift in terms of multicultural communication.
An important element of working in such an environment was the need to understand the dimensions of human relationships.
Citing two well-known anthropologists, Hisham explained the concepts of universalism versus particularism.
According to the former approach “what is good and right can be defined and always applies.” The ‘particularist’ approach believes that “greater attention is given to the obligations of relationships and unique circumstances.”
In other words, the universalist approach favors the rule of law, while the particularist approach acts on the basis of special relationships and unique circumstances, he added. The audience was left guessing where the Arab world stands in such a scenario.
