UNRWA Pioneers Microfinance Programme Benefitting Women and Men.

In 2000, International Women's Day, celebrated on 8 March, was devoted to the issue of women and peace. On 24 and 25 October, the Security Council held its first-ever open session on women, peace and security; calling for broad participation by women in peace-building and reconstruction; but progress in these two areas often has to be measured in small steps. Through various projects, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has been helping women, as well as men, take real steps towards achieving a sustainable development, and doing so under difficult conditions.

The Microfinance Programme, based in the Gaza Strip, provides working capital loans to people there, in an effort to reduce poverty, economically empower refugees, create employment, generate income and be institutionally self-sustainable. Its beneficiaries, particularly women, come from the poorest sector of society. Since the project began in May 1994, the Programme has provided over 18,000 loans to more than 12,000 individuals, more than half of whom were women. In all, these individuals supported nearly 76,000 dependants through the microenterprise activities of UNRWA.

One of those projects is the Microfinance Programme. In February 2000, it was awarded the AGFUND International Prize for Pioneering Development Projects in the field of poverty eradication and alleviation, held under the patronage of His Royal Highness Prince Talal Bin Abdel Aziz, President of The Arab Gulf Programme for United Nations Development Organisations. The innovative Programme was selected from among 139 different projects submitted from 33 countries in four continents.

The Microenterprise Programme is a pioneering I project for a number of reasons. UNRWA has successfully empowered women from among the poorest sectors of the Gaza community through its credit activities. Its Solidarity Group Lending Programme, a sub-programme of Microfinance, was the first of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa to establish a sustainable programme providing credit to women-led microenterprises.

With the poverty rate at 38 per cent for the Gaza Strip as a whole, and 42 per cent for refugee camps dwellers, access to new income sources is crucial for the well-being of the population. Along with rising poverty, the informal sector has been growing as more and more people, especially women, are forced to eke out a living in the margins of the economy. Thousands of poor Palestinians in Gaza have turned to microenterprise activity through streetvending, itinerant peddling, unlicensed taxiing and open air markets to earn an income for their families. The poorest may earn as little as $3 to $5 a day, but for the majority of them this represents the sole means of support for their families. Particularly for women-headed households, the credit provided by UNRWA is the only means they have to purchase the assets they need to create income for their households. They subsist through their microenterprises, and gain a slight advantage to keep them ahead of the next crisis.

The UNRWA Programme has already achieved operational self-sufficiency and is now pursuing the next stage of sustainability-financial self-sufficiency.

It will bring its operations up to a level of efficiency where it is able, if necessary, to leverage funds at cost through other financial intermediaries, i.e., non-grant-based funding bodies, without the loss of efficiency or the ability to reach out to the smallest, informal and poorest microenterprises.

By being the first non-bank credit programme to become operationally self-sufficient through its commitment to microfinance "best practice", the example of UNRWA has encouraged other non-governmental credit providers to also strive to meet these standards. This has led, in turn, to a situation where the best non-bank credit brokers now provide sustainable credit to clients in an environment that matches the needs of the informal and private sector for secure and durable sources of financing.

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Fifty Years of Achievement

Since UNRWA began operations in 1950, it has fed, housed and clothed tens of thousands of fleeing refugees and, at the same time, has educated and given health care to hundreds of thousands of young refugees. Today, it is the main provider of basic services--education, health, relief and social--to over 3.7 million registered Palestine refugees in the Middle East. It has some impressive achievements:

* Sponsors 70 women's programmes centres;

* Supports 33 community rehabilitation centres;

* Provides shelter rehabilitation;

* Bolsters 27 youth activities centres;

* 1,600 poverty alleviation projects since 1991;

* Maintains a registration record of nearly 4 million Palestine refugees;

* Makes available free elementary and preparatory education for all Palestine refugee children;

* Operates 650 schools with nearly half a million pupils;

* Ensures full gender-equality in education since the 1960s;

* 57,000 graduates from its vocational and training centres;

* 16,000 graduates from its teacher-training centres and education science faculties by 1998;

* Established the first residential women's vocational training centre in the Middle East;

* Funds university scholarships for thousands of young refugees;

* Cut infant mortality rates among the refugees from 180 per 1,000 live births in the 1960s to 32-35 per 1,000 in the 1990s;

* Eliminated protein-calorie malnutrition by the 1990s; and the last confirmed case of polio in 1993, thanks to the immunization campaigns.