When Life Gives You Olives

Young Palestinian women like Khuloud hope that learning how to make and sell soap will eventually help them launch their own business ventures. Photo: Adel Saba'neh/Mercy Corps

Khuloud Qassem used to think that making soap from olive oil required complex chemical compounds and snazzy technology.

Now, after taking part in each step of the production process, she knows better. Under the watchful eye of an agricultural engineer, Khuloud learned how to make the soap herself. She also learned how to bottle olive oil and how to package herbs such as sage, thyme and chamomile. Perhaps most importantly, she learned what it takes to sell all these goods in local and foreign markets.

Khuloud was one of 20 young women from the West Bank taking part in a Mercy Corps-supported project designed to nurture the entrepreneurial skills of young women, who represent the largest share of the region's unemployed. These residents of rural, olive-farming communities are learning how to produce and promote value-added products such as soap and cooking oil. Someday, organizers hope, this experience will help them lead their own imaginative enterprises.

"This project," says Khuloud, "has given us the opportunity to move from stagnant ideas and dependency to creative mobility."

Small-scale economic initiatives may be the most promising option for job-seeking youth in the West Bank, where estimates of the unemployment rate range from 25 to 30 percent. And olive trees, an icon of the region, could provide the perfect products. The Palestinian territories are home to the equivalent of 200,000 football fields worth of olive trees, which provide fruits, cooking oil, moisturizing soap and wood for traditional carvings.

Mercy Corps is trying to give rural youth, especially women, more opportunities to engage in these industries. Since May 2005, it has supported the Sharek Youth Forum, a respected local organization devoted to inspiring the next generation of community leaders. Their "Ghosoon" project aims to transform once-isolated women into savvy makers and marketers of upscale olive-oil products.

Ghosoon is supported by Mercy Corps' Phoenix Fund, which finances innovative economic-development projects developed by local entrepreneurs. Mercy Corps’ field offices administer the fund's grants.

In the first stage of the project, 20 women from the outskirts of Ramallah spent 10 days learning how to make olive-oil soap. After another 40 hours of classroom work, they had learned how to market the soap as well as other olive-tree products, such as cooking oil and herbs. Soon, they became stakeholders in a newly created line of olive-oil products that is landing prime shelf space in the West Bank and beyond.

Already, four hotels have signed on to carry the women's soap in their guest rooms. Several supermarkets feature standalone displays of Ghosoon products. The products have been shown at trade shows in Italy, France, and most recently Kuwait, where Sharek members brought 500 pieces of soap, 700 olive oil bottles and 2,200 pounds of packaged, dried herbs to the large Al-Bayt al-Falastini exhibition.

More young women are being brought into the project through training sessions in Jenin, Nabulus and villages around Ramallah. If their experience is anything like that of the first graduating class, they will leave with broadened horizons and more confidence in their own business acumen.

"Now we think, as a group of young women, of approaching institutions that provide loans or grants for small-scale projects in order to obtain support in setting up our own project," says Kifaya Sa'id, one of the original 20 participants. "We are further encouraged by the support and positive attitude on part of our families toward this program, who share our dreams of setting up an actual project that can realize some of our aspirations."