The Munathara Initiative is a registered non-profit organization founded in 2012 with offices in Washington D.C. and Tunis, Tunisia.The Initiative aims at creating an independent and inclusive discussion and debate platform in the MENA region. The Munathara Initiative is working to provide everyone in the Arabic speaking world with a voice regardless of their age, gender or background in order to create a public sphere characterized by evolvability and tolerance towards different points of view.
The Munathara Initiative began in 2012 as a debate platform with the initial costs of the website, debates and TV productions covered by the organization's founder and members. Since 2014, The Munathara Initiative has grown into a major debate organization, was registered as an NGO in Washington D.C, and financed through grants and debate-oriented projects.
We value our independence and our liberty to choose the discussed topics and motions above all, to go hand in hand with our vision of creating an inclusive and open discussion forum that accommodates everyone.
When choosing our donors, we ask that they respect our prime directive, which is that there can be no interference whatsoever in our selection of topics or guests. In fact, we have a bottom-up process, consistent with our mission and philosophy, which gives the power to set topics and motions to citizens.
We only work with donors who respect this rule, and have on several occasions rejected funders who did not.
Currently, our main supporters are Swiss Development Corporation, Federal Foreign Office of Germany and Open Society Foundations. In the past we’ve worked with Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Robert Bosch Foundation, Swedish International Development Agency, Institut für, Auslandsbeziehungen, IREX, National Endowment for Democracy,European Union and Konrad Adenauer Foundation.