Agreement signed to buoy women projects back to safety

MicroFund for Women (MFW) and the Palestinian Association for Children’s Encouragement of Sports (PACES) signed an agreement on Monday to support women whose projects were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tohama Al-Nabulsi, public relations and foreign communication manager at MFW, said in a phone interview with Jordan News that the agreement aims at helping Covid-affected women “stand on their own two feet and carry on their projects.”

“PACES is offering 50 of our beneficiaries JD500 each, provided that they have existing businesses that were hit by the pandemic,” Nabulsi said.

According to Nabulsi, MFW plays multiple roles in the agreement such as providing PACES with a list of the beneficiaries’ names and projects, following up, and looking into the impact COVID-19 has had on the projects in order to be “fair and transparent” in selecting recipients.

“After the selected women receive their grants, MFW, in collaboration with PACES, will follow-up on the projects to see how the funding will be spent and to make sure the projects are going well,” Nabulsi explained. “We will keep in contact with the beneficiaries and make random visits to the projects sites.”

Nabulsi said that MFW’s concept is based on three pillars: fund yourself, protect yourself, and develop yourself. Accordingly, the fund offers its beneficiaries many services including responsible lending, micro insurance, and training in different fields such as financial management and basic marketing.

“This is our first collaboration with PACES. We are very excited about this project. We hope to expand it to reach as many people as possible,” she added.

“With 62 branches deployed in Jordan, MFW can easily outreach beneficiaries all over the Kingdom,” she added.

Nabulsi said that MFW, founded in 1994, is Jordan’s first and largest non-profit microfinance institution that provides women with micro-loans to empower them and improve their lives economically and socially.

Mohammad Omoush, PACES’ general manager, told Jordan News that this agreement goes along with the association’s strategy and the COVID-19 emergency response program in order to mitigate the economic and social crisis and support the fund’s beneficiaries.

Omoush said that PACES basically works in sports for development. However, with the outbreak of the pandemic, the association developed an emergency response program, based on which the agreement has been formed.

“The agreement focuses on supporting women who own small businesses, given that such businesses became insolvent due to COVID-19,” the manager added.

“We hope to see tangible outcomes on the beneficiaries and to benefit from their experiences,” Omoush said. “We aspire through this agreement to transfer the experience of Jordanian women who run small businesses to our workplaces in Palestine and Lebanon.”