Empowering Bedouin women

Aishah was 30 years old when her husband took a younger second wife and abandoned her and her three young children. She was unable to find a way to support herself, and as a member of a polygamous Negev Beduin tribe where divorce is unthinkable, she couldn’t even claim single mother status in order to get welfare assistance.

That was five years ago. Today, Aishah (not her real name) is one of about 20 members of the Al Sanabel cooperative that operates a catering business in the Negev township of Hura. Every day of the school year, the Al Sanabel food production plant turns out 7,000 hot meals. During the past year, the venture earned a handsome profit, with Aishah and her fellow members even receiving dividends amounting to the equivalent of an additional two months’ salary.

Al Sanabel is one of several social entrepreneurial initiatives founded in recent years in an attempt to help the community development of the Negev’s Beduin population, says Kher Albaz, co-executive director of AJEEC-NISPED (Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation – Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development), an NGO that helped launch Al Sanabel.

“One out every two Negev Beduin families lives below the poverty line,” says Albaz, describing the plight of a population of more than 200,000. Albaz is a social worker who grew up in Tel Sheva, one of the first Beduin townships to be recognized by the government and gain access to national infrastructures.

Economic and health problems are particularly severe for the approximately 100,000 Beduins living in towns that are not recognized by the government, notes Albaz.

The bleak physical conditions of the unrecognized towns are visible to anyone who takes the hour-long train journey from Tel Aviv southward to the capital of the Negev, Beersheba – tin shacks dot the desert countryside on the outskirts of the city. Because their homes are not connected to the national electricity grid, many residents use polluting diesel-fuel generators to heat and light their homes. In order to get water for drinking and washing, they rely on water tanks that vendors haul in by tractor over unpaved roads. And with no easy access to health clinics, the infant mortality rate, according to a Health Ministry study, is up to five times the national average.

About 15 years ago, Amal Elsana Alh’jooj, a Beduin woman who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and the late Yehuda Paz, a pioneering leader of Israel’s aid programs in the developing world, established an organization, today part of AJEEC-NISPED, which is trying to create better economic opportunities for the Negev Beduin.

One of those efforts was the founding of Desert Embroidery, a women’s cooperative, which today employs about 80 artisans in the Beduin town of Lakiya, northeast of Beersheba.

“We wanted to start with something that we know how to do, and every Beduin woman knows how to embroider,” explains Nama Elsana, a 48-year-old mother of four, who is one of the cooperative’s leaders. She points out that co-op members purchase raw materials, market their products together, and jointly maintain daycare facilities for their children.

“The idea that Beduin women could become more independent was not something that was easily accepted by many of the men in our community,” says Elsana in an understated way, as she describes how the embroidery workshop was burned to the ground in 2005, in an act of arson perpetrated by local men. “We knew exactly who did it and we gave their names to the police,” recalls Elsana pointing out that the local male police force offered no cooperation. The culprits were never caught.

“But our spirits weren’t broken. The incident only made us stronger,” says Elsana, who helped organize the rebuilding of the workshop. “Since then, they have left us alone.”

Today the co-op gift shop offers colorful products for sale, which include everything from traditional Beduin tribal dresses to chic iPad covers. As Elsana takes visitors on a tour of the showroom, she explains how the intricacies of embroidery designs can reveal quite a bit about both customary Beduin culture and the revolution in gender relations that is underway.

“The color on the front of the traditional dresses worn by unmarried girls is purple.

Red is for married women and blue for widows,” says Elsana. Holding up one of the oldstyle dresses, she points out how the insignia of the sheikh, in accordance with tradition, was incorporated into the center of the design.

“But now we do things differently,” Elsana adds, as she takes out a dress she herself designed. “Here the tribal insignia has been moved to the edge and we, the women, are in the center,” she says with a mischievous smile.

Like the embroidery cooperative, the Al Sanabel catering enterprise, located in the Hura township 20 kilometers east of Beersheba, leverages an ability that Beduin women already have – cooking skills.

“We realized back in 2006 that there was a business opportunity when the government made funding available for the purchase of daily hot lunches for schoolchildren,” says Dr. Mohammed Alnabari, who co-founded the business. “Many of the meals being supplied by regular Israeli caterers were ending up in garbage cans because the Beduin children weren’t used to the taste of the food,” he adds, explaining the competitive advantage offered by the Al Sanabel staff, who could prepare foods more suitable for Beduin schoolchildren.

In order to raise production to an industrial scale, training for workers was provided at Kibbutz Kramim and Kibbutz Nahal Oz, and food production facilities equipped with modern storage rooms and food-processing equipment were installed in the Hura industrial area.

Alnaba ri, 44, has in his own lifetime experienced many of the dramatic transitions undergone by Beduin society. “As a child, I went to school by riding a donkey over a distance of seven kilometers,” he recalls. He later studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he earned a PhD degree in organic chemistry and then headed the R&D department of a large biotechnology company, before returning to his native Hura, where he has become the head of the local regional council.

Alnabari points out that Al Sanabel itself expects to expand its range of business activities in the near future. “We don’t want to become too dependent on a single customer because if the government stops funding school lunches we will be stuck. So we are in the process of getting kosher certification and hope to become a food contractor for industrial plants in the Negev.”

The cooperative business model is also being applied to several new programs that are being initiated elsewhere in the Negev, says Kher Albaz, referring to a bakery café slated to open in Rahat, a Beduin city 20 kilometers north of Beersheba, and a sheep-farming cooperative that has been formed in the village of Abu Krinat near Dimona.

“The sheep co-op enables herdsmen to buy feed for their animals collectively at lower prices, as well as share a marketing platform for selling meat,” says Albaz, noting that as grazing land becomes increasingly scarce for the Beduins there is a need to improve methods for raising livestock. The project also entails instruction on innovative ways to breed sheep and manage herds.

Not all of the new Beduin business initiatives are for cooperatives. AJEEC-NISPED courses in entrepreneurial development have trained individuals to run businesses as wedding photographers, video operators and DJs. Other programs in marketing, branding and advertising have accelerated successful enterprises like Desert Daughters, a natural healing and cosmetics products business run by Mariam Abu Requieq in Tel Sheva, and a jewelry business operated by Mahmud Abu Ganem in Rahat.

Albaz notes that Al Sanabel is regularly visited by delegations from countries in the developing world interested in emulating the co-op business model. He points out that an essential element of the model is that it is accompanied by social and educational programs.

“Those programs are what ensure that the model programs influence the rest of the community.”

That type of influence is summarized by Kamla Alhawagra, a worker at Al Sanabel, who has completed an advanced chef’s course as part of her training and obtained a driver’s license.

“When I was 17, I found a job but the tribal council wouldn’t let me take it because it meant working outside the home. But, years later, after my husband became ill and I joined the co-op, everyone in the community learned to respect me. “ Alhawagra, who used the very first salary she earned at Al Sanabel to buy a computer for her eight children, is hopeful the example she is setting will lead to her children becoming the first members of her family to attend university.

“It’s important for my children to see that they have a strong mother, someone who knows how to be independent,” she concludes. 

The idea that Negev Bedouin women could become more independent was not something that was easily accepted by many of the men in the community.