Sunday, November 25, 2007
So last week I went up to the norther Badia (semi-desert) area near the town of Mafraq to speak to a couple of charity programs there. This is one of the poorest areas of Jordan, and is a stark contrast to Um Uthayna, abdoun, and shmeisani which are the wealthy residential and embassy districts of Amman where I live and spend much of my time. There are few jobs in the northern badia, and many towns there used to rely on income from smuggling various goods, such as cigarettes and goats across the nearby border with Iraq. Since the occupation, however, the border has been closed, and that sort of informal economic activity has mostly stopped. Now, in the words of one woman I spoke to, there are no more opportunities, only dust and poverty. That woman lives in a housing project built by Islamic Relief about 15 years ago. What started out as a charitable endeavor has turned into an investment, since the company hired to build the apartment complex took the IR money, built the project, and then (presumably w/o Islamic Relief's knowledge) started charging the poorest of the poor (who moved in with a promise of free housing) rent and/or bogus maintenance fees. It was an interesting example that not all of the charitable sectors woes in Jordan can be blamed on oppressive US financial policies. Bad management, both malicious and simple incompetence, plagues many projects. Another example is the 10 million JDs (about 14 million USD) the National Aid Fund has invested in micro-finance projects in recent years. The vast majority (something like 96%) of these projects have failed due to lack of training/management skills. For these poorest people of Jordan, many families live on the income generated by, for example, one son who landed a job in the army, or on direct cash assistance from NAF, which does little to change the overall situation and doesn't provide any incentive for people to try to change that situation themselves.
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