Priming Gaza's Economy
BY DAN SADOWSKY | November 22, 2006
"The Palestinian fiscal and political crisis has continued to have an increasingly devastating effect on the Palestinian population," says a November UN report.
Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps
Amid a truce between Israel and the main Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip, Mercy Corps is adding much-needed cash directly into the pocketbooks of hard-working families. This week, the first 100 workers in a new jobs program begin cleaning streets in the center of Dier Al Balah, the largest town in central Gaza.
Their service marks the beginning of a 10-month program to provide competitive-wage, short-term jobs to 2,600 residents of families impoverished as a result of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Palestinian Authority's dire financial straits.
Thanks largely to a $1.27 million grant from the European Commission's Humanitarian Office (ECHO), Mercy Corps will hire skilled and unskilled laborers to paint kindergartens and health clinics, clean beaches, maintain streets and refurbish light infrastructure.
Another three projects are slated to get underway in early December, when 200 workers will begin repairing sidewalks, potholes and storm drains on Dier Al Balah's main streets, cleaning up three local cemeteries and sprucing up two public parks. The latter two projects will entail replastering and repainting walls, planting trees and performing general maintenance.
In the past, much of this type of work fell to municipal workers employed by the Palestinian Authority. But the government has not been able to regularly pay salaries since Hamas captured a majority in legislative elections 11 months ago. The international community responded by cutting off aid, and Israel halted transfers of value-added taxes and customs duties that it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. Since then, clashes between Palestinians and the Israeli military, a virtual sealing of Gaza's borders by Israel, and fighting between the two main Palestinian political factions, Hamas and Fatah, have deepened the territory's financial crisis.
The breakdown in service delivery has led to uncollected garbage and befouled sewers, raising serious public health concerns about potential for disease outbreaks — which would prove disastrous at a time when medicines are in dangerously short supply and health centers are precariously understaffed.
The current jobs program in Gaza follows a summer in which Mercy Corps distributed basic foodstuffs to hundreds families in the beleaguered territory. Photo: Christopher Rooks/Mercy Corps
Mercy Corps' jobs program is designed to get cash into the hands of families so that they can better survive the severe economic downturn. Workers and goods are unable to flow freely across Gaza's borders. The Erez checkpoint, the only crossing point into Israel for people, has been closed to workers and businesspeople since March 12, according to the UN, while the two main cargo crossings have been open fewer than one day out of five.
After starting in Dier Al Balah, the program will extend to another urban center in Gaza, Khan Younis, which is located near the Egyptian border. In all, Mercy Corps will organize more than four dozen workgroups, each with 25 workers. Each will be from a family with five or more members living under the subsistence line, which is defined as $1.60 per family member per day.
Roughly 100 work groups will take on various community-selected projects for 20 days each month for the next 10 months. Each member of the group will work for only one month, and earn fair wages according to whether they are in an unskilled or skilled position.
Over the last five years, more than 89% of resources allocated directly to programs.