Ramallah – In the village of “Jadeera” northwest of Jerusalem, Sally Suleiman and a group of friends chose an old abandoned building as a launching point for their project “Cake and Vanilla”. Since then, they have consistently increased the sale of their date and nut cookies, first in their village and then later, in areas around and beyond Ramallah and even inside the Green Line. The women now create a quality, well-marketed product after honing their online marketing skills, creating and running their own website and being part of other similar websites to display their baked goods.

MIFTAH: Financial and technical support

Sally and her project partners admit that their success would never have been possible if it were not for MIFTAH’s support, providing them with the necessary equipment and appliances and working to develop their financial administration and marketing skills.

“MIFTAH was a huge support,” Sally says. “It gave us material and technical support, which motivated us to push forward and reach as many people as possible. Today, ‘Cake and Vanilla’ is a household name, not just in Jadeera but in areas in and around Ramallah and all over Palestine.”

Challenges and Obstacles

Sally mostly cites marketing challenges due to competition and gaps in the market in places they have difficulty accessing. She also points to the interminable problem of funding the website. MIFTAH, she says, helped them with ways to tackle this issue through providing them with training in online marketing, website management and funding with the goal of reaching a broader public.

Socio-economic impacts

Sally maintains that the project has tangibly improved their social and economic statuses and has allowed them to become more acquainted with society. She also says it boosted their confidence and their ability to depend on themselves and that their newfound economic empowerment had a positive impact for them within their own households and communities.

Community development project

MIFTAH project coordinator for community development and income-generating projects, Hanan Said, said these interventions with young female university graduates are part of MIFTAH’s efforts to empower women and integrate them in the labor market. The projects also give them the opportunity for financial independence and for developing their personal and professional skills. This, Said maintains, will allow them to carry out an effective role by reflecting the positive impact of women’s economic participation, in addition to elevating women’s statuses in their communities.

Ramallah – Sarah, Rimah and Aya are three young women from the villages of Beit Iksa and Beit Dukko, northwest of Jerusalem, who ventured into an innovated project like no Palestinian women before them.

The first step on their road to success was MIFTAH, which has and continues to work towards supporting Palestinian women in the West Bank and in the Jerusalem district in particular, by providing small income-generating projects.

Sarah and Rimah are still university students while their colleague, Aya, is already graduated and works full-time with the project. The women tapped into their local communities’ needs, seeing how construction projects were mushrooming in their area. This, they realized, meant they could easily obtain construction materials if they had the means, including jacks and winches.

For Sarah Liqyaniyeh from Beit Ikas, who graduated with a degree in design and décor, their project to rent out construction materials and equipment was a way of fulfilling the needs of their communities. “No other woman or girl has ever thought up this idea before,” she says. “The project entails renting out construction supplies and equipment – jacks and iron elbows and other materials. This is a project that girls and women are probably not used to hearing about, whether in our villages or in other areas. Projects for women almost always revolve around food or embroidery. My colleagues and I wanted to do something different, something only for us, which would allow us to depend on ourselves. So we chose a project that no one has ever done before.”

She continues, “I studied and worked in design and décor and I have also worked in the field at construction sites. During discussions and conversations with my family and others in my village, I heard them talking about buying construction equipment and renting it from outside the village. This is when I had the idea for our project. I said to myself:

Why shouldn’t I be doing this? It’s a sure thing.” So, I pitched the idea to my two colleagues and they were both enthusiastic about it and thought it was a great idea. Our families were also supportive and even our local communities, which helped us find an easy and quick way to obtain the necessary construction equipment and materials. We have reaped profitable financial returns too, and hope one day we will be able to expand. Hopefully, MIFTAH will continue to support us; after all, it was the one that put us on this path.”

Supporting vital projects such as this one for Palestinian women in several West Bank districts has been a MIFTAH intervention for years. It is part of its “Women’s Empowerment” project, which supports small-income generating projects in cooperation with the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development.

MIFTAH project manager, Hanan Said maintains: “The success story this project was able to achieve, whether in terms of impacting or changing the realities of over 400 Palestinian women and their families in rural areas, cities, or marginalized areas, is that these projects empowered and improved the social and economic lives of women. MIFTAH’s interventions have succeeded in reaching women, particularly the marginalized, in over 70 locations in Jericho and the Jordan Valley, the Ramallah/Al Bireh and the Jerusalem districts,” she says. Said continues that MIFTAH works on an almost annual basis, in cooperation with the Arab Fund, to reach new groups of women in various areas and offer them the necessary support to contribute to their economic participation in Palestinian society, with a focus on Jerusalem and its suburbs.

Through its support for women, MIFTAH seeks to increase opportunities for young women especially, to enable them to participate in the labor market and assume an active and influential role in creating positive patterns of economic participation for women, ultimately elevating their status in their respective communities. MIFTAH takes into consideration the needs of marginalized women by economically empowering underprivileged women through small grants.

Introduction:

From the beginning, MIFTAH’s approach has been to restructure the means by which public policies are formulated in Palestine, where they are based on good governance and democratic values, participation, the promotion of transparency and accountability and the right to access information. These are mainly based on the values of social justice as a result of how decisions are made and policies formulated in Palestine, which are based on centrality and a disregard for any response to the needs of citizens in formulating policies to the point where executive programs do not reflect the approaches and priorities of citizens.

The efforts made by MIFTAH to reach the stage where public policies are formulated based on support for underprivileged and marginalized sectors, especially youth and women, whereby government spending on the social sector was 37.6% of the total government spending in 2019, coming in second after the governance sector.

These efforts faced several obstacles due to the difficulty in accessing information and data or because of the lack of any institutionalization of systematic partnerships capable of involving citizens in the policy-making process in an organized manner. This would allow for more ability to provide decision-making parties with information on citizens ‘needs and translate them into fiscal policies, which is considered the best method for the fair redistribution of public funds, which guarantees the greatest possible benefit for sustainable development.

As a result of these challenges, the OXFAM-funded program “Finance for Development” constitutes an important space for the development of interventions capable of addressing the challenges to public policy formulation in Palestine. It has allowed for the development of focused interventions based on a careful assessment of the skills of those working in decision-making positions in the social sector, especially in budgeting departments.

Release of actual spending reports for the Ministry of Social Development from a gender perspective

The development of MIFTAH’s interventions took place over three stages, the first of which is the institutionalization of the participatory approach in the MoSD through developing spaces that would enable the relevant parties to become involved in the ministry’s’ strategic planning. The institutionalization process included, at the partnership level, between the MoSD directorates and departments on the one hand and institutions working in the empowerment and relief sector, on the other. The second phase reflected the institutionalization of the joint planning councils, which include representatives of direct beneficiaries of ministry services and which are comprised of youth, women’s and childhood institutions and representatives from the districts, municipalities and police and protection services.

The third stage was the culmination of this approach, through the release of monitoring reports for actual spending from a gender perspective. This was imperative for providing data to measure how much women benefited from the MoSD budgets and its services through the various programs and interventions.

The actual spending report from a gender perspective is the first of its kind in Palestine. It analysed the MoSD expenditures and its provisions for the years 2016-2018 in addition to the distribution of salaries and wages according to the gender of its employees. It also analysed the percentage of women working in upper management and in decision-making and policy formulation departments, in addition to the percentage of women benefiting from the services provided by the ministry in its various programs.

The report aimed to process and to disaggregate data from a gender perspective to be used as measurement indicators for the gaps in the ministry’s spending and budgets. It was also aimed at shedding light on the extent of proximity between the ministry’s spending policies to the needs of marginalized sectors, especially women whereby the report includes important information, crucial in the formation of more just and successful fiscal policies.

The report indicated that the MoSD salaries and wages amounted to NIS45,113,734 of its overall budget, while the salaries of its female employees was NIS23.715,295 even though the number of female employees comprises 50% of the overall number of ministry employees. Furthermore, there is only one female employee in a senior position according to the management hierarchy adopted by the ministry.

The report also monitored the figures and data pertaining to the percentage of actual spending on families headed by women, whereby 64.8% of the overall expenditures allocated for the cash assistance program. Meanwhile, NIS1,975,992 of the overall budget was spent on people with disabilities and the elderly, including women, who comprised 36% of this category. Furthermore, women were granted 39% of the allocations earmarked for the social and vocational rehabilitation program while expenditures for women survivors of domestic violence totalled NIS124,000.

The institutionalization of the participatory approach as a result of networking

This development would never have been realized if it were not for the efforts made through networking with civil society institutions and partners and their united efforts to press for the inclusion of citizens in strategic planning through the participatory approach. This was the result of meeting the interests of partners in achieving the goal of these interventions and supporting their implementation on the one hand, and the result of creating balanced professional relations with duty-bearers and holding serious discussions, the outcome of which was the adoption of democratic, participatory standards that reinforce the values of transparency and accountability.

Because of this networking, MIFTAH has greater ability to influence the way in which policies are formulated because of the ability to provide data on government spending for its programs and to reconstruct plans, which bridges the gaps in spending. It is also able to shed light on the needs of social sectors, especially women, through the redistribution of public spending. It should be noted that the needs of women were taken into consideration in the preparation of the 2020 budget. This was reflected in the increase in spending on programs from which women benefit. Therefore, the 2020 budget is more responsive to needs from a gender perspective.