MIFTAH
Thursday, 28 March. 2024
 
Your Key to Palestine
The Palestinian Initiatives for The Promotoion of Global Dialogue and Democracy
 
 
 

“MIFTAH showed me how to look beyond just numbers”

Raniya Abu Ghabush is one of the participants in MIFTAH’s Gender Budgeting Program who stands out. The project is part of the organization’s efforts to promote capacity building in government institutions within its Good Governance and Democracy Program, funded this year by the NGO Development Center, NDC.

Abu Ghabush has been working with the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in its National Accounts Department for the past eight years. She says her job entails working with economic indicators such as domestic and gross products and gross national income. “We also give a forecast of the economic reality in Palestine through a group of economic indicators,” she says.

Abu Ghabush talks about her first encounter with MIFTAH: I participated in this program with MIFTAH from the start almost five years ago, even before it became independent. When the concept of gender-responsive budgets became an issue spoken about globally, I started looking into this internally in the PCBS because our administration is always looking to follow up on anything new. MIFTAH took the initiative to offer training in this field. I was chosen as one of the participants for the training sessions, which were very professional and useful.

“MIFTAH played a large role in my development in this regard. It gave me the opportunity to participate in writing a paper on the issue of gender budgeting right from the start. MIFTAH should be given credit for this because most institutions prefer people with long years of experience. But MIFTAH wanted to give a chance to the young people. The paper was about a survey of the labor force and how much it measures household chores done by women, posing that it should be included in the public income. It was a position paper and not an analytical one. The second paper was a policy paper about irregular work. This was really a good opportunity for me and I was influenced greatly by it. MIFTAH suggested my name for more than one training opportunity. Because of this, many institutions involved in gender budgeting were introduced to me through MIFTAH, which opened doors for me in the field of gender training.”

Abu Ghabush continues, “The two trainings I attended offered me a much deeper understanding of the issue of gender budgeting and helped me both at the personal and professional levels. Even the institution I work in became more confident in me because I became much more knowledgeable about the subject.”

How successful do you think the project was in reaching its goal? Abu Ghabush replied, “I think the project was extremely successful. MIFTAH offered high quality training to different sectors because it was trying to cover a large portion of the society. However, such steps need a political decision to be influential and to create a practical basis because change needs a lot of time.”

To what extent did the participants interact during training sessions? Abu Ghabush answered, “The truth is, MIFTAH was very courageous in disregarding so many voices that insisted there were other more pressing priorities in our society. Still, MIFTAH pushed on and its training was on a wide scale. The gradually raised awareness was quite clear among the beneficiaries. In the beginning, people in general were not very receptive to the idea of gender budgeting. Now, much of the discussion around this subject is positive and there is much more awareness and knowledge in the discussions being held in this regard. Even the participants made it clear that they are not just receivers. “We are no longer talking only about principles and theories but we are discussing details and aspects of creating gender responsive budgets and offering alternatives. This just shows how quickly people learn and analyze,” she said.

Abu Ghabush also acknowledged that her experience with MIFTAH left a lasting impact on her personality as an economist. She says before she was part of MIFTAH’s training, she would look at numbers abstractly, from a purely economic viewpoint. “I rarely look at what is beyond the number. I would never give a masculine or feminine character to figures but after I participated in MIFTAH’s project, I now unconsciously categorize numbers in either their male or female context. In this sense, MIFTAH has given me the ability to understand people’s needs and how to fulfill them. It showed me how to identify a goal and reach it and how to look outside the box of pure numbers. I now have the ability to reflect a certain statistic within its gender context to the public. I am also more capable of gender analysis.”

In terms of her own job, Abu Ghabush says the move towards becoming more gender sensitive is a global move and so has touched on her work at PCBS in that regard. “Gender is now a global economic trend, so we cannot separate ourselves from this,” she says. “As professionals in this field, we must influence decision makers in both the economic and gender aspects.”

“Most importantly I would like to thank MIFTAH for giving our youth a chance to prove themselves,” Abu Ghabush said. “I hope I can always stay in touch with MIFTAH and its programs.”

 
 
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