Projects

Girls’ Educational Empowerment Project

Bedouin girls aspire to study and get a higher education but are often forced by their parents to stay at home. In order to reduce this phenomenon, we developed an intensive year-long program to reduce the percentage of young girls leaving school and help them and their parents understand, appreciate and adapt to the new role and status of women in modern society. The program involves increasing their self-esteem, remedial learning to keep them in school, inter-personal communication skills, exposure to the outside world through field trips and lectures, health education, building awareness of social issues and civil rights and more.
In January 2006, Association’s team made survey among a number of 380 the Bedouin pupils, 100 female pupils who go to Junior School. The results of the survey showed that 100% of the girls don’t go to High school. There are two main explanations: Firstly, these girls have low achievements at schools and have a feeling “I have nothing to do in the school”, so they chose to sit at home. Secondly, some parents were afraid to send their girls to school as a result of insecurity situation in the city, so they chose to keep their girls at home.

“Receive Your Civil Rights” Project

The Bedouin community in Taibeh suffers from very high illiteracy rate; most people do not know how to read and write and are highly ignorant of our basic rights. We do not know, for example, that we are deserving of Social Insurance rights, tax returns for those who work, parents are not aware of their children’s educational right. Elders do not realize we deserve more old age relief than we receive in practice from Social Insurance, parents to children with special needs do not know how to obtain the rights of their medically disabled children and this is due to lack of access to the institutions, lack of knowledge of Israeli bureaucracy and lack of proficiency in filling-out official forms. We feel powerless when dealing with the authorities. Moreover, the Taibeh Bedouins suffer poor treatment from the municipality in terms of the basic services they deprived of us. It should also be stated that the Bedouin pupils in Taibeh’s schools are discriminated against, and this is felt in their educational accomplishments. A study undertaken this May has shown that most Bedouin pupils suffer from exceedingly low achievements and lack of attention.
This project attempts to solve a large portion of these problems. It is intended to raise people’s awareness to rights, hold community lectures about rights, and educate people to demand their own rights from local and State authorities,
The proposed project is intended to raise awareness among the Bedouin population of Taibeh about the rights, as well as to assist our population in obtaining our rights and interacting with the authorities and bureaucracy. The project involves both assisting people on an individual level as well as coordinating and acting on a larger scale to improve the situation and status of the Bedouin community living in Taibeh.