Project ongoing in 2013 is an extension of the “Developing Agro-Rural Co-operatives in Palestine towards Good Governance and better Transparency and Accountability project” following recommendations of ARIJ, partners, beneficiaries and project funders.
Bethlehem, 29 April 2013:- The Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem ( ARIJ ) Good Governance ( GG )program concluded on Saturday the 27th of April it’s 5th and final workshop targeting 60 local cooperatives on training on applying the Cooperatives Good Governance manual that was produced in the “Developing Agro-Rural Co-operatives in Palestine towards Good Governance and better Transparency and Accountability”project.
The primal stage of the project aimed at educate on and enhance good governance practices among the target groups, based on the principles of transparency, accountability and participation, the project main focus was on introducing an accountability system that will be adopted and implemented by the targeted cooperatives and introducing participatory governance and good governance principles, and developing ARIJ’s planning monitoring and evaluation system applied with targeted cooperatives.
The activities of this project resulted in the creation of the Cooperatives Good Governance manual that comes in response to the cooperative needs increasing accountability practices, reviving and empowering the role of Oversight committees within the targeted cooperatives.
Following and intensive review of the project outcome ARIJ and the cooperation with the stakeholders targeted by this project concluded the need of extending the project into covering more needed capacity building based on the Cooperatives Good Governance manual produced. The extension of the project was decided on with aims to target a wider group that introduced over 60 new cooperatives based in the West Bank to the manual produced and the concept of Good-Governance .
“the extension of the project caries a great importance, cooperatives have stated mission and goals which they need to maintain as their compass of their existence and work, this is why they are good at and this is it is important” noted Majd Khoury GG specialist working on this project.
To achieve its objective, the extension of the project focuses on enhancing Good Governance among the partner organizations and cooperatives, strengthening capacities of cooperatives and transform them into socioeconomic organizations. Of the other main objectives is to prompt successful model cooperatives and increasing women representation and participation in targeted cooperatives.
“Women participation in these trainings by 40%, is an obvious sign that women are to be empowered in leading the Good-Governance approach, the project contributes to introducing Palestinian women who are able to assume leadership role in a professional manner. In other words, this project will contribute to enhancing social norms” commented Eman Abed Rabbo, project coordinator, “it empowers women to assume leadership presenting successful career women working in side by side with men in the field of cooperatives” concluded Abed Rabbo.
The activities of this project will include providing cooperatives with supportive documents and forms, conducting training sessions and awareness sessions, conducting good governance assessment for cooperatives that benefited from the project , preparing cooperatives relevance manual, conducting an assessment to evaluate good governance policies among stakeholders and partners, and conducting perception survey.
The project activities aim eventually at achieving the vision of model cooperatives contributing to Palestinian economic development.