Personal Report - Group Work

Group : Issam Eddine, Pakinam, Paulus, Lea, Gertrude, Jake

Subject : How to prevent the economic system from disadvantaging child carers
(Parents) ?
Our group decided to tackle the issue of social and economic disadvantages facing
parents who chose to have children. This issue was chosen after several discussions
within the group about the subject of our work.
Initially the group gathered because all the members showed interest in working on
economic empowerment issues, with some members focusing on youth
empowerment, others on employment and others on womens economic
empowerment. Lea suggested the idea of tackling the issue of women not being
compensated for doing child care work, we then discussed how parents are not only
compensated poorly, furthermore, the parents are being disadvantaged on many
levels including :
- Not being hired by companies because of maternity/paternity leave concerns.
- Loss of career development opportunities because of child care duties.
- A lack of a fair compensation to afford paying for child care and/or staying at
home to do it.
We then came up with our guiding question which we believe can cover these
problems and would lead us to understand the challenge more and potentially come
up with solutions. Our reflection process started with a research period where each
member of the group gathered information (i.e studies, articles, etc) and shared it
with the fellow group members. We then had a meetings in order to discuss what we
found and the potential solutions and came up with aa structure regarding our work.

We decided that we would split the work on 3 parts : the problems, the solutions and
finally the case studies and best practices. Each two people focused on one of
these three main components in order for us to discuss it and include it in our
reports. We later were able to write our group report based on all the work we did as
a group, and were able to prepare our poster based on the content of the report.

Generally, I believe our group work was an opportunity for me to deepen my

knowledge about this issue while also learning from the different perspectives of my
fellow group members who come from different backgrounds. It was also a good
opportunity to get to know them on a personal level through the working interactions
we had.

I would also like to note that the instructions for the group work were not always clear
and that we, as a group, had different understanding of what was required for us
which lead to some complications sometimes and also to the fact that we had to
contact the organizational team several times to ask questions.