Bedouin women find alternative forms of employment
[Rahat, Israel] Assma Kboau, 21, gazes into a computer monitor, typing as she speaks to a customer in Hebrew. A hands-free microphone is placed over the flower-patterned gray hijab she wears. While a Muslim women working in a call center is hardly unusual, this business operates in the middle of a mosque.
Around Kboau her colleagues, each wearing a colored headscarf, babble into headsets. Large posters of smiling children decorate the walls and inflatable toys hang from the ceiling. The thirty young workers staffing the call center are from Israel’s Arab Bedouin community, a section of the population where women’s unemployment rate is 80 percent, and the poverty rate is among the highest in Israel.
Many of the Bedouin adhere to conservative traditions which discourage women from working away from home unprotected and unsupervised. Bezeq, Israel’s national phone company, circumvented these restrictions by opening the call center in a mosque. The workers use a separate entrance from the worshipers.
“It was hard (for my family) to accept that I go to work – I am the first girl in my family that works,” Assma Kboau, one of the shift managers at the call center, told The Media Line. The women in the center work eight hour shifts speaking to customers throughout Israel. Most of the women come from the village the mosque is built in, Hura, or from the surrounding area.
“At first (my family) said no but I told them that I had to… for the money, (and) to improve myself, my skills,” Kboua said. Having come to work for Bezeq straight from school three years ago, Kboua now plans to attend university.
“When they came here the women were like children: unconfident, not knowing how to communicate… how to multitask, how to use a computer, or how to sell (a product),” Gal Politzer, the manager of the call center, told The Media Line. This has changed in the two years that most of the women have worked in the office. “Today they are very confident – they stand on their own and have an opinion,” Politzer said, noting that the women’s self-worth and status in their families has grown.
As part of their preparation for working at the Hura call center, the women receive training in Hebrew and computer skills at a nearby employment center in Rahat, part of a program run by the Ministry of Economy. The center is part of a drive by the Israeli government to improve employment opportunities for the Bedouin, particularly among women.
Poverty is highest among sectors of Israeli society where only one individual in the family works. This is most prevalent in Jewish ultra-Orthodox families, where many men study Jewish texts full-time, and in conservative Arab and Bedouin families, were women often stay at home for reasons of modesty and tradition.
An estimated 200,000 Bedouin live in southern Israel, in the Negev desert, but almost half are in unregistered villages which are not acknowledged by the Israeli government. This can mean that services and infrastructure in Bedouin communities are below standard: schools may run without access to computers and with class sizes higher than the national average.
A number of barriers prevent Bedouin women from entering the workforce, Ella Bar David of the Ministry of Economy’s Department for Employment Regulation, told The Media Line.
Child-care is expensive, and many women lack basic skills in Hebrew, English, math and computers, she said.
Previous efforts to bring more Bedouin women into the workforce have failed. In the past, whenever the government conducted a project with the Bedouin community all decisions were made in Jerusalem, Mahmoud Alamour, the director of the Rahat employment center, told The Media Line. This is no longer the case, Alamour said, pointing out that his staff are themselves mostly Bedouin. “(Here) the Bedouin develop the models. We come from the community, the families, the neighborhoods, the villages. We know what is needed and what skills are required,” the director said.
A lack of trust in the government has been one issue the center’s staff had to work through. To begin with the local people would not interact with the center but eventually, “when they saw that all of us were Bedouin they started to believe in Rahat,” Alamour said. The current generation of Ministry of Economy employment centers are intended to act as “one-stop-shops” providing all services, training and assistance required.
Significantly, Bar David said, this is not “the government coming and saying (to the Bedouin) more of your women should work.” Social change is being driven, in part, by Israel’s increasingly high cost of living. “Bedouin society itself understands that if a family wants to survive in this economic situation and to live a high quality of life both people in the household need to work,” she said.
Women used to have more status in the Bedouin household, Eve Tal, manager of resource development with The Association for the Improvement of Women’s Status, told The Media Line. They cared for the home, the crops, the children, and had an important economic role to play alongside their husbands’ through trade they made from crafts. This changed when the government moved Bedouin from their existing villages to live in towns in the 1990s, leaving women with little employment opportunities and isolated within their new brick homes, Tal said. But a number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have sought to connect buyers with Bedouin women’s handicrafts in order to create much needed jobs.
The Association for the Improvement of Women’s Status, also known as Desert Embroidery, has sought to give Bedouin women an outlet to sell traditional embroidery to a modern audience. Predictably, smart phone cases and laptop bags are one of the hottest selling products made by the women, who work from home in order to avoid cultural sensitivities, Tal said.
Opening of small scale private businesses has been one of the success stories of the employment centers, Mahmoud Alamour said. It takes time to build big industry in an area but giving a woman a little training and some basic supplies can be all that is required for her to start her own small business. A number of boutique enterprises in cosmetics, hair products, weaving and other crafting have been started in this way allowing women to make money from home.
Programs which are culturally aware might just be what is needed to help tackle endemically high levels of unemployment. Whether it is a call center operating in a mosque or women making crafts from home to sell, schemes which seek to work within the context of Bedouin communities’ traditions seem likely to succeed.