Empowering Syrian women role through micro-financing
Syria, Economics, 9/8/2004

At 35 Sabha supports four children alone on the minimal income she earns as a season agricultural worker. It was not a life she expected. It has been a desperate struggle and there is never enough money to meet the needs of her family. Then in the spring 2004, Sabha was introduced to a micro-financing project launched by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).

She has now purchased sheep and is building a business that has changed and improved the life of her family. For 40 years, WFP has served the people like Sabha and others in Syria in life-altering ways. It has responded to emergency needs in natural and man-made disasters, such as the 1998-2000 drought and the collapse of the Zaizoun Dam in 2002. It has also launched development projects of fruit plantations and reforestation and focused its interventions on rural women. Finally and most recently, WFP's work in Syria involved procuring food following the conflict in Iraq.

WFP has consistently followed through with its mission to feed the hungry and attain sustainable development. However, though it may come as a surprise to many, food is not the only service that WFP provides. Since 1998, the UN agency has worked closely with Syria's State Planning Commission (SPC) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform (MAAR) in handing out micro-loans to women from various parts of the country.

Indeed, WFP was among the first United Nations and international agency to sponsor income-generating activities in Syria. Since 1996, it worked in partnership with Governmental counterparts to ensure poor and food insecure women's access to human and physical assets and support them making a shift to more sustainable livelihoods. In this regard, WFP's main implementing partner in Syria, The MAAR, has played a major role in identifying and addressing poor and food insecure women, while WFP provides the loans taken from its Project Savings Fund.

Being self-reliant is an important element of living in rural areas of the country. Syrians living outside major cities are exposed to a harsher climate that does not allow for conventional, urban-style livelihoods. As these people must depend on animals for income, it's crucial to be armed with the skills to control what resources they have.

In 1996 WFP, in conjunction with the Government of Syria, launched a Start Your Own Business (SYB) course for those seeking to attain loans as a way to familiarize potential beneficiaries with the process of self-reliance. This 12-day program provides students with basic business and marketing skills along with negotiation skills and decision-making. Last but not least, it provides women with self-esteem awareness, key element to every successful project.

Most beneficiaries have chosen to purchase sheep or a cow and use the newly acquired livestock for animal husbandry and for producing milk, meat, and wool.

The unique aspect of WFP's micro-credit program (as well as most of its other programs) is its special emphasis on empowering women. Beneficiaries of SYB and subsequently, the micro-loan, are mainly women between the ages of 18 and 50.

WFP also provides beneficiaries with food needs, eliminating the immediate scramble for food and strengthening their focus on profitable investments. In line with all of its other projects, WFP advocates the inclusion of women in basic and economic decision-making through micro-loans. To date, there are more than 3,000 vulnerable and food insecure women, living in remote and marginal areas, who have been involved in WFP micro credit activities, receiving loans for a total of over 71.4 million SP.

Despite the traditional role of men as the household provider, the existence of women-headed families is now a reality as means to Supporting and Empowering Women-Headed Households. In order to adequately provide for themselves and their families (especially children), women like Sabha must be mentally prepared for the responsibility and the challenge Sabha is now able to produce butter, yogurt, and cheese to feed her children, removing complete dependency on the crop-yielding season as her only means for providing income and food for her family. In turn, Sabha's children go to school with full stomachs, and return home with the energy to help their mother with the sheep.

WFP and the Government of Syria plan to build on this kind of success and serve more women like Sabha with the aim of improving the condition of the poorest and giving them hope for the future.

Previous Stories:
  On the Syrian-Jordanian Free Zone Company   (8/31/2004)
  Project for Institutional Development of Organic Agriculture in Syria   (8/21/2004)
  National strategy for sustainable development in Syria   (12/24/2001)

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