This week I've been doing some volunteer work at a women’s centre in a Palestinian refugee camp just north of Amman, Jordan. The Jerash "Gaza" Refugee Camp predominantly serves Gazan refugees from the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Established in 1968, the camp is populated by 28,000+ Palestinian refugees. What distinguishes it from the thirteen other Palestinian camps in Jordan is that, due to their 1967 status, 97% of camp residents are without a National ID number. This leaves them without access to the basic rights that Jordanians and 1948 Palestinian refugees are granted. The pictures below give a glimpse of some of the surface level challenges of living in the camp, but don't fully capture the depth of the issues that residents face.
The Jerash Women’s Centre has recently been set up to offer women in the camp a dedicated space to learn English, discuss relevant issues (“majilas”) and even practice yoga. While the activities are popular, the centre itself lacks a coherent strategy, so I came in to run three days of strategy workshops with the women so that there is a clear plan going forward.
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| Jerash Women's Centre |
With the many issues women face in their day-to-day lives, it is difficult for them to step out of the present and think about the future that they want to have. So I started the first day by introducing the concept of "visioning" to a 5 year time frame. I think they thought I was mad when I got them cutting, sticking and colouring in collages to represent their individual visions for 2017, but they went with it and produced some very creative and insightful pictures that represented what they want for themselves and their families. After grasping the concept on an individual level, they worked as a group to map out their shared vision for women in the camp and for the women's centre in particular.
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| Individual visions |
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| Basis of shared visions |
On the second day, we identified some of the barriers/issues the women face in 2012 and grouped them under five themes: health, education, employment, family and law. We then decided which of these themes fell within the scope of the women's centre to address: health, education and employment. These themes formed the process of the problem tree analysis, a methodology that the women grasped really well and fed into with insight and intelligence. I was more than impressed. We rounded off the day by looking at how all the issues are linked and one can feed into another. For example, a poor diet can lead to illness which may prevent education and therefore limit employment opportunities.
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| Problem prioritisation |
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| Problem tree analysis for education related barriers |
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| Identifying links between the problems |
On the third and final day we worked on the "road map" that will link the issues/barriers women face in 2012 to the position they want to be in 2017. Very often in these kinds of processes, it's tempting to launch in straight away with the answers/activities before actually asking and analysing the questions. So by taking the time to do that, the women were really able to express WHAT they wanted the centre to achieve and HOW to achieve it, backed up with a solid understanding of WHY they wanted to do it. We started by rephrasing the problem statements into goals and converting the causes of the problems into objective statements. The women then split into three groups under the three themes and came up with some really innovative suggestions for possible activities that could be carried out at the centre in order to achieve the objectives. Ideas for health included bringing specialists from Amman to give interactive sessions on topics such as first aid and reproductive health. For employment, the women raised the need for entrepreneurship style training to help them convert some of the skills they have (needlework, beauty, hairdressing...) into a small business. And the education group raised their desire to learn more about the subjects that their children are studying at school so they can help them with homework.
The next step is to take the nuts and bolts of the strategy produced with the women this week and turn it into a coherent strategy with a log frame for measuring progress, a clear budget broken down over the 5 years and an action plan with clear milestones for putting the strategy into practice. I'm hoping to follow up with some consultancy work in February to help this to happen. So look out for a follow up post in the not-too-distant future!
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| The process from bottom (problems) to middle (activities) to top (goals and vision) |
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| With some of the women outside the women's centre, plus Nick and Jackie who work with the centre on an ongoing basis (on left) and Mahmud, the incredible 17 year old student who interpreted between me and the women (on my right) |
