Let’s Invest in Women!

It shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us just how interconnected the world we live in is today. To see a global community at work, just take a peek at the economy. Time and time again, it reigns clear how much each member of our global family relies on each other to build and sustain local economies. But for some reason, there has always been a difficult place for women around the world to break into in our global economy - entrepreneurship. After President Barak Obama’s State of the Union address back in February, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon reminded us,

"Often entrepreneurship remains forgotten on the list of leading answers to poverty by those who run programs aimed to help the poor… because all too often small business owners either remain invisible or uncounted. And that is even more the case when it comes to women… we don’t count what we don’t see and we don’t invest in what is invisible.”

The benefits of female run businesses are not strictly financial, but research has shown that the entire family benefits when women start controlling the family checkbook. The family becomes healthier and more nutritious, and the extra cash flow gives their children access to a better education. With more money, they can continue to send their children to school, especially daughters who so often draw the short straw when it comes to access to education.

TYO understands how important it is to invest time, resources, and effort in female entrepreneurs through our Women's Incubation Services for Entrepreneurs (WISE) and Fostering Women Entrepreneurs in the Middle East (FWEME) programs. By empowering these women by providing them with the skills, means, and confidence to make their dream of owning and operating a business come true, we can look forward to future generations of Palestinian girls not having to work quite as hard to join the workforce outside their homes. Hopefully, as the women in our programs establish a firm footing in the business world, they too will inspire even more Palestinian women to follow this path they’ve helped pave.

It’s clear, we need to invest in women!

-Emily

Emily is an intern at TYO Nablus.