House 20, Neighbourhood 6
P.O. Box 1588
Omer 84965
Israel
- Gender
Sidreh is a key player in the development of the Bedouin community of the Negev, and we have become a key representative of the Bedouin woman’s voice. The organisation is a registered NGO, governed by a board and with concrete project work carried out by nine core staff members. We are funded by grant income from institutional donors, including the EU and USAID, and we have an average annual budget of c.$350,000. Sidreh is the only organisation with a special focus on reaching women in unrecognised villages across the Negev. These villages are not recognised by the government, they are not provided with basic services such as running water, sanitation, paved roads, electricity or gas, and because of their legal status, they are subject to a policy of demolition and destruction. We partner with local women in the unrecognised villages and local NGOs that share our feminist values. We see the empowerment of women as a strategic goal for the sustainable development of local Bedouin communities in the Negev.
Sidreh’s mission is to support the Arab-Bedouin woman in the Negev in her pursuit of the full realisation of her rights and entitlements as well as those of her community. To realise this Sidreh focuses its work on four main strategic objectives:
• Access to knowledge: Improving educational levels of Bedouin women.
• Access to resources: Increasing the skills and income of Bedouin women.
• Gender equality and participation: Improving women’s social positions and advancing women’s rights.
• Sustainable development: professionalisation and organisational development.
The Education Programme ensures women and adolescents can acquire skills and gain new knowledge and awareness that improves both their daily lives and that of their communities, while enlarging their scope of involvement in the community. We have more than 20 years of field experience and have developed a curriculum and methodology recognised by the Ministry of Education. This enables women to receive an official high school equivalency certificate, and we have helped more than 2,700 adult women learn to read and write and more than 200 women have completed high school through our activities, with many continuing to higher education.
The goal of the Empowerment and Participation programme is to promote gender equality, strengthen the collective voice of women and their meaningful participation in all spheres of life, and the realisation of their rights. Since the programme was established, more than 2,000 women have participated in leadership and rights awareness programmes; we have built the first Women’s Centre in an unrecognized village serving more than 90 women; and the programme has also built the skills of over 400 local women leaders and advocates.
The goal of the Economic Development Programme is to ensure Bedouin women in the Negev acquire skills to become entrepreneurs or can join the labour market and have access to a stable income. The programme has resulted in 120 women gaining the tools to ensure the optimisation of spending, benefits and savings by boosting their financial literacy, allowing them to incorporate financial planning strategies in their households; 115 women have developed entrepreneurial skills and expanded or established a small business; and 650 women, children, and men as well as 80 volunteers have benefitted from the innovative Desert Gardens’ Project, launched in 2013.
Sidreh is a Bedouin women's organisation, run by Bedouin women from the community, therefore we are truly part of the community we serve. We have a deep knowledge of the cultural and social intricacies of Bedouin society, and strong personal and professional awareness of the context of Bedouin women. Our extensive experience and expertise in working with Bedouin women in recognised and unrecognised villages in the fields of education, economic development, media, advocacy, participation, gender equality, and empowerment demonstrates the breadth of our work and the depth of our knowledge in seeing these issues with a gender perspective in our society. We have a unique understanding of the community and we are able to gain access to some of the most vulnerable in our society, and present issues from a perspective that other organisations and institutes would not be able to. Furthermore, Sidreh has grown with steady organisational development year on year, and a key factor to this development is the trust, respect, and support we have gained from the wider Bedouin society. Therefore, we are able to contribute the unique and strong voice of Bedouin women, to bring this group to the wider community of Mediterranean civil society engagement and cooperation, and to bring new perspectives from women from a traditional society that will present our values and cultural heritage. This will increase the pluralism of the network, increase its reach to those who have typically been marginalised within their own and the wider society, and increase the breadth of opportunities for greater engagement and inclusion for network members.
Sidreh would like to join the ALF Network to increase our engagement with civil society actors across the Mediterranean region, to learn from network members, and to share our knowledge and insights into Bedouin culture and our civil society work. Sidreh would like to become actively involved with the network with a particular view to increase our engagement working on women’s rights and gender equality, and to gain insights from other actors across the region who are working on these issues. We feel this will strengthen our association and increase the number of Bedouin women involved in civil society engagement, it will strengthen our role working on gender equality in Israeli society, and broaden our awareness of how to ensure relevant international legislation, such as CEDAW, is effectively applied to Israeli legislation for the benefit of women from minority communities. So essentially, shared knowledge and increased engagement are our initial interests in joining the ALF Network. Over time, as we become more associated with the network, we would like to develop project partnerships to expand our work in breadth and impact, to gain greater resources to achieve our aims of gender equality and to help others do the same, and to get more groups who would not normally consider gender equality a core issue for them talking about the issues. We would be happy to hold discussions with potential future partners on the broad range of gender rights issues how to use Sidreh’s work in their future media work.