Most of the women I see at AMERA are mothers. Single mothers. Husbands have disappeared, are in detention, or are not in the country with them. While it is often easier for refugee women to find work in Egypt than men, this becomes more difficult when they have children – particularly young children under the age of six. What can they do to survive, and nurture their little ones, especially when financial assistance from the UNHCR is only for people with certain levels of legal status and for short periods of time?
Thinking through these things has led me to believe that we’ve got to be more creative at AMERA… to develop interventions that support the individual in crisis and yet go beyond a band-aid solution. Sure, there are vocational training options in Cairo, but these do not provide the tools of the trade afterward or guarantee jobs… and almost all the women I know want to take the coiffeur training. What else can women with small children do?
What about:
- Opening a daycare in their community? (Especially as many women need child-care in order to take other jobs! So this creates a broader enabling environment for women to work)
- Starting a restaurant or catering service in their community? (I know I’d take Somali or Eritrean food over Egyptian any day, and I’m guessing that the people from these places would appreciate this as well!)
- Developing arts and crafts to cater to Egypt’s booming tourism industry
- Tailoring/sewing/knitting/embroidering garments if supported to start their own business from home
- Offering in-house beauty/cosmetics services (eg. waxing, henna…)
Ideally these kinds of ideas would come from the women themselves based on an understanding of the needs or potential niches in their community and the resources available to them. I’m sure they could come up with ideas ten times more innovative and profitable!
But, it’s not as easy as brainstorming… realistically here, what do women need to start up these kinds of projects?
- Working capital or a start-up grant for the initial resources
- Management or marketing skills
- In some cases direct skills for their profession
- Space to work from (eg. a house… Which many of them lack!!)
So where does one begin then: with organizations like Americans Aiding Refugees with grants for resources? With CBOs that could help women connect with the required resources and trainings? By talking with religious institutions that have a mandate to help the poor about offering skills trainings or grants? By conducting these focus groups with the women themselves? We have the framework for a project here.
And what are the remaining obstacles? The biggest that comes to mind is lack of desire of some women to support themselves!
I have noticed that women who have experienced horrific things in their past (eg. physical torture, rape, years of domestic violence in a forced marriage) often have a more difficult time taking positive initiative. In a book I’m reading about positive psychology right now there was a story about a test done on three groups of dogs. The first group received electric shocks, but could press a panel and turn them off, which they learned how to do. The second group was given electric shocks and could do nothing to stop them. A third group of dogs was not shocked at all. Then all three groups of dogs were placed boxes with a barrier they could jump over to exit. While inside the box they were shocked but when they jumped out they would no longer be shocked. Both the first group and the third group jumped out of the box, but the second group (that previously could not control the shocks) simply whimpered and stayed in the box. I wonder if some of these women are like this? They expect to suffer regardless of what they do, and don’t have any vision for how their lives could be different so they just stay in the mental boxes of victimhood that they’re familiar with. And it doesn’t help when they’re told by their doctor at one of UNHCR’s implementing partners: “All you need to do it find a husband!”
How can humans reprogram ourselves to envision a life beyond suffering, and to take some positive steps towards this? I don’t have answers to this yet – particularly in working with people operating with such different cultural frameworks. At AMERA we’ve talked things through rationally with women – explained the brokenness of the UNHCR system and that they will likely not have all of their needs met by other people and therefore have to begin meeting their own needs. We’ve suggested counseling (which is usually rejected). We’ve offered vocational training courses with UNHCR partners (though these programs are not always available in their mother tongue). We’ve talked about how strong and resilient these women have been in coming to Egypt and in raising their children, and the importance of continuing to support them. What else can we do? How do we break through?
There are some who do want to become self-sufficient through skill and business development. I now have three single mothers enrolled in a sewing course with the hopes of a grant for sewing machines and materials for them after they graduate. I have another woman working to develop a handicraft business if she gets a $200 grant for the start-up costs. It’s about finding the right match at the right time, and the resources to support this. (Fingers crossed that the grants come through for these women!).
The challenge is that these interventions are helping only a very small group of women who have taken the initiative to come to AMERA. What about the women who are not aware of our programming, who may be in situations of even greater vulnerability? How could one scale programming up to affect a much larger group of women, and how could one respond to their specific cultural backgrounds and linguistic needs? I think that these kinds of discussions need to happen with UNHCR-Egypt so that local integration becomes a more reasonable possibility here. In situations of protracted limbo we need a development orientation as opposed to a humanitarian emergency-response approach.
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