Why this should be a top priority?
Many Syrian women cannot even remind how their life had been before the war! Displacement, poverty, and insecurity is the master of the situation in the last ten years.
These overwhelmed women have maximized responsibilities and they don’t save any effort to improve their families’ circumstances. From their efforts to gain living up to search for missing beloved people, going through attempts to provide their families with essentials of life, and facing poverty.
As the tragedy of Syrians deeps, many parties tried to make efforts toward the economic empowerment of Syrian women. Nevertheless, urgent relief efforts still dominate most relief organizations’ mentality.
Syrian women .. Duplicated economic suffering.
In Syria, women are suffering political and social insecurity, carrying the burden of the absence of their husbands, and get affected by the general bad humanitarian situations. Moreover, women are facing the absence of legal support for their rights. Not to mention the violence and domination over them.
In front of all these challenges and troubles, women are still claimed for doing their roles inside the family and outside to meet the increasing needs.
As a result of armed conflict, work opportunities decreased significantly. This affects women and excluded them from the work market. In contrast, the efforts of economic empowerment were not enough.
A report by the Damascus center for research and studies issued in 2016 indicated that the female employment rate for the age group between 15 and 24 years old had decreased to 2.80% according to the International Bank.
Another report indicated that Syrian woman earns 65 USD at best inside Syria.
Syrian women’s need for economic empowerment is increasing.
Many Syrian women became the only breadwinner for their families overnight. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any work opportunities, safe circumstances that enable them to move to long destinations to make living, or even a community culture that encourage their work for a rewarding wage.
In this manner, the importance of economic empowerment emerges as a suitable opportunity to improve the economic situation for women through vocational training, small-scale projects funding, and providing work opportunities in private businesses.
Empowerment programs vary from targeting women as a part of the family or focusing on the poorest women, or women with entrepreneurial ideas.
MIDMAR and the empowerment of Syrian women.
MIDMAR and among its efforts for social empowerment, is allocating a significant part of our activities toward the empowerment of Syrian women.
For example, we developed a project to improve Syrian women’s skills within profitable professions that enhances public health services, via the representation of women in health institutions, improving education, participation, employment, and social recognition of women in the countryside of Syria.
Also, we make sure to evolve women in vocational training, and various courses that we conduct to assist the youth of both genders in change.
As we believe in MIDMAR that societies own their key to change, we make more efforts to empower these societies toward managing available resources among our top targeted group, which is women.
Suggestions for Developing the Syrian women empowerment methods.
We believe in the importance and effect of conducting dialogue with several parties to improve our field-based role in assigning and implementing Syrian women’s economic empowerment programs. This could maintain mutual efforts to emphasize suitable social philosophy that encourage women empowerment.
The most important related suggestions are as follows:
Balancing between local and international aspects: Due to the technology rapid development, emerging online markets, and remote work opportunities related to the internet, women’s empowerment and training programs should take these progressions into consideration to balance the methods and skills of empowerment toward fulfilling local and international requirements.
Providing constant advisory services: keeping direct orientation for women within the empowerment process assists them to develop and take necessary corrective actions when needed. Conducting training programs for women is essential but not enough alone. Related training parties must keep advising women.
Enhancing local efforts toward supporting female business owners: Environmental factors affect the success of women willing to establish their businesses. Interested parties and organizations should raise awareness about supporting women till they become more effective within their societies and get off the economic burdens’ related troubles and challenges.
To make it more clear, Syrian women still lack the required support to reach economic resources, can manage them, take necessary decisions related to economic independence, and maximize their share in development in general.