MIFTAH
Friday, 29 March. 2024
 
Your Key to Palestine
The Palestinian Initiatives for The Promotoion of Global Dialogue and Democracy
 
 
 

Ramallah – Iftikhar Abdel Qader is from the village of Beit Sourik, northwest of Jerusalem. She manages an embroidery project in conjunction with a group of women from the village, for which MIFTAH provided the core support, both financially and through project management training. The project is part of MIFTAH’s “Small income-generating projects for rural women”, funded by the Arab Fund.

"The most important part of this project," says Iftikhar, "is that it has guaranteed a better life for her and her family". The same applies to the other women in the project, who feel they are more financially independent.

But before they were able to manage the project, the women were exposed to a “micro-project management” training, which provided them with important information about the role of micro-projects in social development, the components of such projects and techniques of confronting problems and difficulties. The training also focused on the stages of the project’s life cycle, how to prepare a feasibility study, in addition to exercises on the importance of cash flow, the risks of buying and selling and bookkeeping.

The training course demonstrated a crucial lesson for Iftikhar: the importance of not going into debt, which is a key to the success of any startup project. Iftikhar is now looking to expand her aspirations, hoping that MIFTAH might offer more training courses in tailoring. The women said they hoped to develop their embroidery skills into making dresses and blouses.

Manal Awwad is an employee from the town of Bir Nabala, northwest of Jerusalem where she heads the Sanabel Welfare Society. The training she and her colleagues received culminated in a project for making soap and oil-based perfumes. The starting point, Manal says, is ‘never to lose sight of the project and be able to face the challenges and difficulties that come your way, adding that it is crucial to know the demands of the market as well". Manal admits that before the training course, her information on project management was "very little – not more than 5% I would say”. Today, things have changed. MIFTAH, she says, has empowered her and her colleagues and has given them the opportunity to be an active and vital part of their community.

The significance of the training course for those involved in the embroidery and soap and perfume manufacturing projects is that they go beyond merely offering projects to beneficiaries to actually running them and marketing their products. Ibtisam Arroub, who supervised the two-day training, says: “Through the training, each participant was able to offer input and modifications on their projects. Basically, future training courses can be built on this one because the women are still in need of more training to expand their knowledge of project management so they can benefit as much as they can.”

MIFTAH project manager, Hanan Saeed, says she anticipates that the organization’s training achieved its main goal of raising the awareness and capacities of the beneficiaries on how to manage their projects and to reap their fruits in the future. She explained that 14 women from the villages of Jaba’, Beit Sourik and Bir Nabala participated in the training course. MIFTAH’s goal was to train the women on management skills before they took over the projects and to learn how to write a feasibility study for their respective projects. This way, the women would have developed an orderly, systematic and organized project concept based on sound financial foundations.

 
 
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