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Last month Reuters reported on the humanitarian crisis engulfing the Palestinian territories. As is often the case in these situations, children are the most deeply and unjustly affected.

Six months of a crippling international embargo on the occupied Palestinian territories has brought its economy to a virtual standstill. As a result, children are being driven increasingly to find work to help support their families.

According to the Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), 40,000 children under 18 work in occupied Palestine, 73 percent of whom were forced to work due to severe financial conditions.

According to UNICEF, two thirds of Palestinian children live below the poverty line (US$2 a day), 38 percent of Palestinian children are anaemic and 23 percent of students and 36 percent of teachers are unable to get to school on any given day.

Named after a word that means “roots” in both Arabic and Hebrew, the Shurush Initiative works to combat these conditions by providing financial and technical support to Palestinian microfinance organizations that offer microcredit loans and business training:

Shurush’s inaugural microloan program is a partnership with the East Jerusalem YMCA to support small, rural enterprise development and create job opportunities in the West Bank small business sector. Eight entrepreneurs under age 35, in rural areas surrounding Bethlehem and Ramallah, have received loans. An additional six entrepreneurs in Gaza have received loans through a partnership with Kiva.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, the practice of microfinance provides a means for local entrepreneurs, otherwise excluded from traditional financing avenues, to invest in their own local economies.

For more information on how you can invest in small businesses in the Middle East (or elsewhere around the world), check out the investment opportunities at the Shurush Initiative through Kiva for yourself!

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