Community Development

Interpal works closely with local NGOs, which it sees as forming a vital lifeline that links the poor and needy to the social, medical, educational and welfare services they need. Interpal appreciates that NGOs working on the ground face many challenges and hazards on a daily basis, and seeks to ensure they continue their good work in their local communities by helping to fund their excellent projects and encouraging their expansion where possible. Interpal’s support for local NGOs also includes office refurbishment, the provision of office equipment, training programmes for staff and key workers, and contributions towards running costs and salaries.

Supporting the Community

Interpal has funded self-help projects which support cottage industries by providing business start-up funds as well as interest free loans. These projects are mostly aimed at creating jobs and empowering women, especially widows, who have no source of income to enable them to provide for their families. One such example is the embroidery and needlework project in Ramallah which has provided employment for a number of women in the production of high quality hand crafted clothing items and accessories for sale.

Interpal and its partners have sought to support job creation projects, such as the charitable Bakery in Hebron set up to provide bread for an orphanage. Until it was closed down by the occupation forces in 2008, this employed at least 10 people, and also ran as a commercial enterprise selling bread and pastries to the local community. Every so often the bakery distributed the excess of what it produced to poor and needy families in the area.

Due to closures and curfews, many Palestinian farmers and producers are finding it almost impossible to reach market places to sell their produce. Interpal has helped with start-up funds to build cold storage or freezer units and to establish retail outlets. Interpal has provided the funding to purchase livestock for a number of farming families who have lost their livelihood. The aim has been to encourage the families to develop their own animal breeding programme whilst retailing the produce of the ewes to a nearby milk processing plant. The animals also provide milk that can be made into cheese or yoghurt by the family for sale and for their own consumption. Some of Interpal’s other community development projects include:

Shelter Provision

Interpal helps to provide temporary shelter to those whose homes have been demolished or damaged beyond repair by underwriting the costs of alternative housing for each family.  Their needs are then regularly reviewed to assess if aid needs to continue. When Rafah came under fire in May 2004, Interpal responded by providing temporary shelter for homeless families. Those in need were given basic furniture, kitchen utensils, bedding, and food aid.

Those whose homes can be repaired are given housing grants. Interpal has also provided housing aid to University students who were stranded and could not return home due to prolonged curfews and closures.

Water Projects

Many communities in Palestine have had to suffer the destruction or contamination of their water supply. Due to large scale demolitions there have been serious shortages of clean drinking water, and demand for this precious resource dramatically exceeds supply. In the Gaza strip, for example, infiltration of seawater as a result of over-pumping, and of sewage water from cesspools and neglected infrastructure, makes 90% of the water non-potable.

Interpal has worked hard to provide clean drinking water in many Palestinian areas through the digging of wells, supporting water purification and desalination plants, and providing tap water to schools and religious and heritage sites.

In Jabalia, which is one of the most over-crowded areas in Gaza, for example, the water supply was extremely impure and salty, and there was a chronic shortage of clean drinking water. Interpal provided the funding for the construction of a water distillery station, which provides safe, clean drinking water to over 5,000 residents in the local district. Funding has also allowed the construction of a water distillery station in Khan Younis which provides clean drinking water to 18 schools in the area, as well as a desalination plant in Al Qarara, benefiting local schools and over 7,000 residents.

Interpal has also helped to provide generators to power pumps extracting water from wells in refugee camps in Lebanon thus ensuring that a constant water supply is available as a result of a reliable source of electricity for the camps. This is especially important as refugee camps are not connected to the main utilities supplies and have to rely on supplies from within the camps themselves.

For further information visit our Clean Water Project page.

Tree Planting and Agricultural Development

Over one million olive trees and hundreds of thousands of fruit trees have been uprooted by the occupation forces in Palestine since the intifada began in 2000. This has had a catastrophic economic consequence on the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families dependent on these trees for their sustenance. Furthermore, the festivities and traditions that accompany the olive harvest form an integral part of Palestinian culture, where there are trees that are over a thousand years old still producing olives today. The uprooting of trees has therefore caused many financial, cultural, and ecological harms to Palestinian society.

As part of its commitment to the UN ESCWA initiative on Rehabilitation and Development in the Occupied Palestinian Territory - Interpal chose to focus on Agricultural Land and the Agro-Industrial Development needs of the Palestinian people. This recognised that the historic relationship between Palestinians and their land represented a fundamental component of Palestinian existence.

Strengthening the capacity of Palestinians to reclaim and rehabilitate Palestinian agricultural land and helping them to secure markets and value added opportunities for their products is seen as integral to the creation of a viable Palestinian State. Indeed, agricultural and agro-industrial development are seen as directly tied to the health and welfare of Palestinians who regularly suffer economic dislocation from destroyed cropland, damaged infrastructure, closed borders and restrictions on trade.

Interpal has committed US$3,000,000 to implement this initiative, which seeks to raise the production capacity of Palestinians living under occupation by introducing them to new knowledge, technologies, processes and expertise available outside the occupied territories. Other implications of this project include.

Interpal’s Plant a Tree in Palestine Campaign seeks to replace the over one million trees destroyed during the last Intifada, in order to alleviate poverty, provide income generation as well as food security and economic self sufficiency in the Occupied Territories.