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Woman lifts her family out of poverty in the West Bank

Starting a business with limited resources in East Jerusalem, West Bank, is a challenge — especially for women. For Inayat Nageeb, a housewife and a mother of three sons and two daughters, life has not been easy. Her husband works as a guard at a mosque, with a monthly income of approximately US $80 more

Employment programme gives hope to new graduates in Jordan

Like many other young students of his age in Jordan, Yousef El Mughrabi, 23, was full of dreams and plans for his future. Living in Ma’an, a southern Jordanian governorate where one in four people live in poverty and one in five is unemployed, Yousef’s dream was a simple one: securing a respectable more

Bedouin handicrafts goes global through small businesses

Since 2006, Yosra El Sayed, a 25-year-old mother of a two, had been struggling for the survival of her small Bedouin handicraft shop, which competes against the big bazaars of Beer El Abed in Northwest Sinai. Yosra has an innate talent that yields high quality products, but without the adequate mana more

A glimpse of hope for better times ahead

Raqqa, once a prosperous province that hosted one of the capitals of Harun Al-Rashid, the famous Abbasid Caliph, has seen a dramatic downturn in recent years. Even before the crisis in March 2011, the Raqqa population grappled with some of the worst development indicators in the country. The governo more

Nurturing entrepreneurship amidst destruction

J.H. never imagined that her home made business will flourish and the “baytoti” brand will become a household name in Raqqa and neighbouring villages. J., the eldest of her siblings, is the principal breadwinner in a family of six. At 43 and single, she has been earning little income from selling ho more

Pomegranate boom in Upper Egypt

Al Badary is a village in the heart of Assiut governorate in Upper Egypt. The small village made it to the news headlines in the past when the raging fire of vengeance between competing tribes spread wreaking havoc in the area. Recently, the name of the village is circulating in local news, telling more

Local development helps integrating returning moroccan immigrants

Growing climate variability, intensifying droughts and diminishing water resources over the past decade, have been driving families of Ksar Laachouria and neighbouring oases, in Fezna, in Errachidia Tafilalt region of Morocco, out of the land they have lived on for many years. These fast-progressing more

"From the bottom up":local development brings regional impact to East Sudan

In the remote village of Diemoyo of Red Sea State in Eastern Sudan, a region suffering from some of the lowest development indicators in the country, the once high rate of child and maternal mortality has recently been reduced. The challenges for reducing maternity and child mortality are ma more

Women farmers promote food security in North Kordofan

In Bara, a locality in North Kordofan that encompasses 90 tiny villages, the greenery can be deceptive. The flat desert sprawls for miles around, dotted with tiny villages where the only colors to be seen are the bright clothes of women coming back from their weekly trip to the central market of Bar more

Women’s economic empowerment in Iraq

A number of remarkable Iraqi women entrepreneurs who managed to break social barriers and venture with successful small businesses came together to share the challenges they faced and how they overcame to become an integral part of the Iraqi economy. The past three decades in Iraq have been more

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Arab Development Challenges Report 2011

This second Development Challenges Report, coming at a time when the region is passing through a critical historical juncture, attempts to go beyond the numbers to uncover processes that have underpinned mutually reinforcing drivers of social, economic and political exclusion.

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