Pal-Think concludes the «Young Pens» radio programme

Pal-Think for Strategic Studies concluded its radio programme “Young Pens”, through which policy papers produced by Pal-Think are presented and discussed — within the project “Preparing a Civic Intellectual (2)”, implemented by Pal-Think with funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), with the aim of strengthening democratic values and human-rights concepts among young people in the Gaza Strip, creating young leaders able to spread these values in their society, and enabling them to play their part in decision-making.

In the programme's third and final episode, a policy paper was presented and discussed titled “Poverty among women in the Gaza Strip — between the economic reality and the absence of gender justice”. The paper was discussed by youth activist and rights researcher al-Qassem Afana, a member of the civic-education body within the project, who had received a training programme on rights and democratic concepts and on the scientific methodology of writing policy papers. The paper Afana prepared comes within a set of papers that discuss and present proposals on issues concerning youth and Palestinian society as a whole.

In presenting the paper, Afana took up its principal axes: the political, cultural, and social dimensions of the issue of poverty among women; the indicators and statistics showing the level of women's poverty; the unemployment rate among women and its effect on Palestinian families; and the causes that have driven poverty rates higher, including the fall in production tied to the blockade of the Gaza Strip. Afana likewise addressed the role of small enterprises in delivering job opportunities to women, contributing to solving the issue of unemployment and poverty among women. In the same vein, Afana discussed the relation of the absence of gender justice to the state of poverty among women, and the role of Palestinian laws in doing women justice. Afana moved on to the most important interventions that could contribute to raising the indicators of justice, strengthening women's political participation and their participation in decision-making, and guaranteeing their access to their full rights — contributing to curbing poverty among women and providing them job opportunities.

It is noted that the programme comprises a series of activities in the “Civic Education” project, to be followed by discussion sessions with the public and civil-society institutions to discuss the papers — reaching the largest possible number of society's different groups and, through them, decision-makers.