About the Course

The Minimum Economic Recovery Standards (MERS) are the internationally recognized consensus on best practices for building economic resilience for crisis-affected communities. SEEP developed and refined MERS over a ten-year process with input from hundreds of organizations and practitioners. Launched in 2017 with funding from USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, SEEP’s Mainstreaming MERS initiative is designed to increase awareness, sustained learning, and wide scale uptake of the Minimum Economic Recovery Standards by organizations working in disaster response and economic recovery.

The objective of this training is to equip the participants with the knowledge and skills to understand and advocate for the MERS.

This course is run by Trust Consultancy & Development, an organization independent of the SEEP Network. For more information click here.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this training, the participants will be able to:

• Communicate what the MERS are and how they could be used effectively to their peers;
• Articulate the value of the MERS to their work and crisis-affected populations;
• Recognize the relevance of the MERS for all types of market-based programming for relief, recovery, long-term development, and resilience building across any sector;
• Identify and use the most appropriate MERS in planning, implementing, and evaluating intervention activities.

About the Trainers

Saad Barood

Saad is a specialist of MERS with a long experience as a focal point and a trainer. Over the course of his career, he has developed tailored training kits and delivered training workshops on many topics in entrepreneurship and MERS, for diverse organizations such as Gaziantep Chamber of Commerce, Watan, Bousla, COSV, Kudra, Women Now among others. He is a certified trainer in MERS, Entrepreneurship for LIFE Incubator (ToT), Remote management, and Design Thinking. Saad has also participated in the review of the Arabic version of the MERS training manual.

Saad also has experience delivering training workshops remotely. Saad holds a Master of Science in Aerospace and Aircraft engineering, and is studying a Master of Arts in Political Science and International Relations. He is fluent in Arabic and English.

Youssef Almustafa

Youssef Almustafa possesses over a decade of management experience in monitoring & evaluation, data collection in Arabic and English, and capacity training for humanitarian organizations in the MENA region. He has dedicated his career to ensuring that relief agencies receive the best possible information to allow for maximum positive impact. He has excellent communication, data analysis, reporting, and leadership skills gained through years of international work. As an experienced consultant and researcher, Youssef has undertaken over 30 needs assessments and M&E consultancies across a range of humanitarian sectors, including education, livelihood, food security, shelter, gender, protection, vocational training, refugees’ integration, WASH, health, and others. He is a certified trainer of MERS (certificate obtained by the SEEP network in May 2018).

Application and Fees

This training is free of charge. However, participants must attend all sessions of the training, and keep their cameras “on” during every session.

Applicants can register for the course here (English) or here (العربية).