Jordan’s low female labor force participation rate has long confounded policymakers, researchers, and activists. Despite achieving progress on several determinants of female labor force participation over the last decade, including increasing levels of female educational attainment, higher ages of marriage, and lower rates of fertility, less than 15 percent of women are actively engaged in the formal economy, as compared to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regional average of 25 percent. Of the women that are actively engaged in the economy, more than a quarter of women are unemployed. There are several barriers to women’s economic participation in Jordan, including social norms, legal restrictions, available job opportunities, and a lack of safe, affordable, and adequate care infrastructure and transportation. 

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the already low economic participation for women and high unemployment rates in Jordan. During the pandemic, women were more likely to lose their jobs than men or leave the workforce due to additional unpaid care responsibilities. The loss of jobs comes with severe social impacts for women, as economic inequalities worsened by the pandemic have placed the most vulnerable groups of women at an even higher risk of violence. Despite the difficult situation, there is hope that an expansion of the digital economy and remote work opportunities that developed from or were strengthened during the pandemic may help to limit some of the barriers to women’s economic participation. Even before the pandemic began, the development community placed faith in the power of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to increase economic opportunity for women, as well as underserved communities, by connecting them to jobs and markets, overcoming restrictions to economic participation related to social norms, mobility, or time poverty.

Thanks to funding from the American Center of Research, I was able to conduct qualitative fieldwork in August and September 2021 to better understand how the COVID-19 pandemic affected women’s economic participation through ICT-enabled work, with a particular focus on Jordanian women utilizing ICTs to support home-based businesses and micro-entrepreneurship, and work in the gig economy. This research builds on my earlier fieldwork (2018–2019) investigating whether and how ICTs help overcome constraints to female labor force participation in Jordan.

My earlier research found that Jordan is currently prioritizing women’s entrepreneurship initiatives for economic development and women’s empowerment. Government and donor initiatives have focused on supporting home-based businesses and micro-enterprises that utilize ICTs for selling goods and services online (including informal online commerce and e-commerce). Other initiatives have focused on additional forms of ICT-enabled work, such as connecting women to remote-based job opportunities (e.g., call centers). Finally, some entrepreneurship initiatives connected women to market opportunities in the gig economy through online platforms. 

I learned that many Jordanian women, given numerous constraints to their participation outside of the home, are interested in pursuing ICT-enabled work to generate income while working from home and that these new forms of economic participation are blurring the differences between formal and informal labor. My research also revealed that opportunities in ICT-enabled work could benefit families in intangible ways by increasing support for women’s economic participation and normalizing women’s engagement in the market. However, my research also found that differences in class, geography, and education play a substantial role in a women’s economic success with ICT-enabled work. 

During my ACOR fellowship, I conducted ethnographic research as a volunteer at the local nonprofit JoWomenomics and was involved in the day-to-day activities and research of an organization devoted to increasing the role of women in the economy in Jordan. I observed firsthand the activities around women’s economic participation and was grateful for an opportunity to engage with the local research community. In addition to ethnographic work, I conducted twelve interviews with heads of gig economy platforms, online commerce experts, home-based business advisors, and funders of international development organizations focused on supporting women’s entrepreneurship. These semi-structured interviews added significant insights into the state of women’s ICT-enabled work during the pandemic and its current recovery. 

My research revealed that women’s ICT-enabled home-based and micro-enterprises struggled throughout the pandemic, with a significant decrease in demand and revenue in informal online commerce. As female freelancers often enter the digital economy without any guarantee of future work, online financial opportunities were unstable and scarce in the midst of COVID-19. In addition to economic difficulties during the pandemic, women could not deliver goods and services due to the lockdowns. However, micro-, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) also have an essential role in pandemic recovery. Informants shared several ways to support women’s ICT-enabled home-based and micro-enterprises. They expressed a need to move enterprises from informal online commerce fully into e-commerce by connecting businesses to export markets and providing training on how to conduct global e-commerce (e.g., Amazon). There is also a need to support women to formalize and strengthen their businesses by helping them integrate their products and services into high-potential value chains.

My research also found that while the gig economy can provide market opportunities for women, there were clear winners and losers during the pandemic. Like other businesses in retail, hospitality, and the services sector, several platforms in those sectors were unable to operate during the pandemic, limiting income-generating activities for women. Even more, the environmental challenges of remote work were higher for female employees due to conflicting roles — employee, daughter, wife, mother, housewife, etc. — presented by at-home work. However, informants shared that online platforms that helped connect women, and others, to remote work opportunities, such as technology and programming, graphics and design, business and consulting, etc., were able to grow. As the pandemic drags on, the advancement of remote work platforms has been paralleled by schools becoming more adept at operating under health restrictions, easing the burden of childcare on women.

Finally, my fieldwork found that although the pandemic exacerbated already low levels of women’s economic participation, it also accelerated the shift towards ICT-enabled work and the digital economy. Several informants shared how local businesses were digitalizing quickly at the start of the pandemic, finding ways to adapt their business and employment practices. One study found that 82% of Jordanian firms would or might adopt more remote-work practices. As government and other stakeholders increasingly recognize the need to transition to the digital economy, a key opportunity is presented for investment in women’s technological training, literacy, and participation. If inclusion is prioritized by providing women with tools of digital upskilling, there is potential to decrease economic, cultural, and educational barriers to female labor force participation, simultaneously responding to the global, digital shift in work.

Allison J. Anderson researches, teaches, and consults on gender, economic development, digital development, socioeconomics, and the Middle East. In 2020, Allison earned a PhD focused on women’s economic participation and entrepreneurship based on fieldwork as a Fulbright Research Fellow in Jordan. Previously, Allison was an associate program officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where she focused on strategic planning and engagement in the Office of the President for Global Health. Prior to this, Allison worked as a strategy consultant in Deloitte’s Government and Public Services practice. Early in her career, she served two years in the U.S. Peace Corps in rural Jordan. Anderson holds a PhD in international studies from the University of Washington Jackson School of International Studies, an MA in international relations and international economics from the Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and a BA in political science and Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Michigan.

The post Jordanian Women and the Digital Economy During COVID-19 appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Josephine Chaet is a doctoral candidate in the anthropology department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and an ACOR-CAORC pre-doctoral fellow for the summer and fall of 2019. Prior to her current fellowship at ACOR, Josephine was a Fulbright Research Scholar in Jordan during the 2018-2019 academic year. Her research while at ACOR focuses on the historical and contemporary experiences of women’s organizations and on the public actions of those associations over time.

In its broadest sense, Josephine’s dissertation explores the interactions between female organizational actors, legislative change, and the state. In 2017 the Jordanian Parliament repealed Article 308 of the nation’s penal code, which allowed male rapists to avoid severe criminal sentencing if they married their female victims; that decision was in part attributed to the collective efforts undertaken by members of parliament and women’s organizations throughout the country. Taking that recent development as a point of entry, this dissertation project examines the ways in which women’s organizations in Jordan carve out spaces from which they have the potential to inform processes of legislative change. Josephine’s ethnographic and historical approach to understanding the work of women’s organizations aims to illuminate the existence and importance of civil society organizations while decisively bringing gender into focus within scholarship on the state.

Josephine’s work in Jordan specifically attends to women’s organizations located throughout Amman, where such associations have, since the mid-twentieth century, contributed to politically-oriented discussions throughout the country. While earlier phases of Josephine’s research in Jordan utilized a mixture of participant-observation and in-depth interviews, this phase of her ongoing dissertation research project will devote time to archival work while continuing and building upon earlier aspects of this research.

Josephine received her Master’s in Anthropology from the University of Illinois – Chicago in 2018, and has conducted extensive language training and preliminary research in preparation for this phase of her dissertation research. She received her Bachelor’s (with honors) in History and Anthropology from Grinnell College in 2016.

________________________________________
Help ACOR Advance Knowledge 
Donate to the ACOR Annual Fund today

Assist us in providing our programs and services to researchers worldwide

_____________________________________________

The post Josephine Chaet, ACOR-CAORC Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Summer / Fall 2019 appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

A public lecture

Palestinian Reproductive Death
and Life during the British Mandate

A lecture given by

Frances S. Hasso

Duke University
2018 ACOR CAORC Post-Graduate Fellow

Wednesday March 14, 2018
at 6:00 p.m.

About the Lecture:

This lecture emerges from a book project that examines Palestinian women’s experiences of perinatal and child death during the British mandate (1920–1948). Oral histories with women and scholarship on the mandate are silent on quotidian experiences of reproduction and child death. The project relies on analysis of 2016, 2017, and 2018 interviews with Palestinian women in historic Palestine and Jordan as well as British, Zionist, Jordanian, Palestinian, and missionary archival sources, including oral history projects conducted since the 1990s in Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine.

About the Lecturer

Frances S. Hasso is Associate Professor in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University with secondary appointments in the Departments of Sociology and History. She is an Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2015–2018). Her recent publications include Freedom without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions (with Zakia Salime, Duke 2016), Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (Stanford 2011), and Resistance, Repression and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine and Jordan (Syracuse 2005).

Frances Hasso earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  She has an M.A. in Arab Studies with a concentration in Economic Development from Georgetown University and a B.A. in International Relations from the University of California at Los Angeles. She also holds a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan. To learn more, visit her website or read her ACOR biography.

The post Lecture “Palestinian Reproductive Death and Life” on Wed. March 14, 2018 @ 6 pm appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Jordanian women cannot pass their citizenship onto their children and spouses, while Jordanian men can pass theirs onto four wives. This policy leaves the children of Jordanian women married to non-Jordanians with limited access to public education, healthcare, and jobs. Although there are currently about 50 countries with some form of gender-based discrimination in their nationality laws, many states, like Egypt and Morocco, have removed this discrimination over the past 20 years.

Jordan has resisted nationality law reform despite the persistent efforts of Jordanian women campaigning for equal citizenship rights. Nimah Habashneh spearheaded these efforts and founded in 2009 the campaign “My Mother Is Jordanian, and Her Nationality Is a Right for Me” (“أمي أردنية وجنسيتها حق لي”). This campaign emerged out of her blog describing the problems she faced in caring for her children, who could not receive Jordanian citizenship because their father was Moroccan. She created a Facebook page for the group in 2009, which has gradually gained traction, starting with 25 likes in 2009 and moving up to 8,644 likes in 2014; currently, 14,705 people like the page.

Habashneh energetically campaigned for nationality law reform, staging protests and sit-ins, regardless of the weather conditions, in front of parliament, the Prime Ministry, Ministry of Interior, and other government offices. She also scheduled meetings to discuss the issue with Jordanian parliamentarians, international organizations, charities, human rights groups, and the media. Her efforts cultivated a group of women married to non-Jordanians (with husbands from Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, Britain, the Netherlands, and Iraq) who were facing the same problems in raising their children—many of whom did not know they could not pass on their citizenship until their first child’s birth. These women learned of the campaign through their friends, television programs, their children, and social media.

In February 2013, Habashneh’s campaign joined other groups to form the coalition “My Nationality is the Right of My Family.” This coalition consists of 12 civil society organizations and 18 individuals, who advocate for constitutional and legislative amendments that affirm gender equality and enable Jordanian women married to non-Jordanians to pass their nationality on to their spouses and children. One of the coalition’s greatest challenges has been overcoming the government’s argument against reforming the nationality law because many of these women are married to Palestinians (62% according to government estimates). Thus, if women could pass on their citizenship, then government figures suggest that this would nationalize about 222,500 Palestinian children. Officials claim that this nationalization would hurt the Palestinian cause and provide support for right-wing Israeli claims that Jordan “is Palestine” and the “alternative homeland” (الوطن البديل).

In 2014, the coalition, with support from Dr. Mustafa Hamarneh and the Mubadara movement in parliament, advocated fiercely for nationality law reform. However, Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour could only concede a set of privileges (مزية) for the children of Jordanian women married to non-Jordanians and residing in Jordan for at least 5 years. These privileges included free public education and health services, access to more professions, exemptions from work permit fees, and access to driver’s licenses. Prime Minister Ensour promised to provide special identification cards to facilitate these services by June 2015, though he also noted that these cards did not signify a step toward granting these children Jordanian citizenship.

This reform in late 2014 divided the coalition between those who supported the privileges as a step forward and those who viewed them as a barrier to full reform. The vicious political debates that the policy spawned also encouraged many activists to table this topic and focus on other less sensitive reforms promoting women’s rights. The coalition experienced another devastating blow when Habashneh was diagnosed with late-stage cancer and passed away just two months afterward, in early 2015.

Despite these setbacks, many women quickly sought the new id cards for their children, costing some women 140 JD per child in medical tests, transportation, and other related costs. However, the excitement concerning these changes faded as it became increasingly obvious that these cards did not deliver on the government’s promises. Women reported that bank staff, police officers, and cell phone dealers did not consider these cards as a form of identification. Further, some schools and employers did not recognize them, claiming they had not heard of the new policy. Government officials blamed bureaucratic delays in implementing the policy, but activists viewed these delays as intentional government resistance to expanding their rights and as a means of collecting money. Activists also highlighted the harassment they experienced when trying to claim these rights, with government staff chastising them for marrying a non-Jordanian or telling them to go to their husband’s country.

Following Habashneh’s last wish for the campaign to continue, members have persisted in organizing and protesting about the unenforced privileges as well as advocating for full reform of the nationality law. These efforts remain critical for impacted families. For instance, members have described situations where sons have attempted suicide because of the hopelessness they feel, and some mothers have tried to lose their pregnancies to avoid having another child facing these challenges. The situation is less bleak for daughters who can marry Jordanian men and gain citizenship for themselves and their children. However, daughters only receive citizenship if their husband gives it to them. In some cases, husbands decide not to pass their citizenship in order to prevent their wives from working.

Despite the hardships faced by the children of Jordanian women married to non-Jordanians, most of them feel a deep connection to Jordan. They describe themselves as having citizenship in the sense of belonging and devotion to the country (مواطنة), even though they do not have Jordanian nationality in the form of a passport and national number (جنسية). These children are born and spend their entire lives in Jordan, often knowing very little about their father’s country. They speak with a Jordanian accent and view Jordan as their homeland, which they are ready to serve. Regardless of their legal status, they view themselves as Jordanian and hope for a time when they can align their patriotism with their passport.

Learn more about this topic by investigating the links below, some of which primarily include content in Arabic.

Campaign Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/MomJordanian/
Coalition Page: http://irckhf.org/en/project/coalition-my-nationality-right-my-family
Short Video Featuring Affected Children: http://haqqi.info/en/haqqi/media/who-are-we

Lillian Frost was an ACOR-CAORC Fellow, Fall 2017. Before her ACOR fellowship, she had conducted ten months of dissertation research in Jordan with support from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program as well as George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies. She has been to Jordan nine times since first studying Arabic abroad at Yarmouk University in 2009.

Lillian Frost is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in George Washington University’s (GWU) Political Science Department. She has an M.A. in  Political Science from GWU (2016), an M.P.P. in Public Policy from the University of Virginia (2012), and a B.A. in Political and Social Thought as well as Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia. See Lillian Frost’s website for her contact information, CV, and further details on her research.

The post Patriots without Passports appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Jordan has one of the lowest rates of female labor force participation in the world. Women’s contribution to the Jordanian economy was roughly the same in 2014 as it was in 1996, a low 12.6 percent. In 2013, the World Bank put Jordan’s total female labor force participation rate at 22 percent, a fourth of the male rate of 87 percent. In 2016, Jordan ranked 142 out of 144 countries in terms of female participation in the economy.

These figures are largely influenced by high female unemployment outside Amman. While the Department of Statistics does not publicize comprehensive data on the gender breakdown of employment in Jordan’s governorates, women’s employment tends to be centered in urban areas.

These areas outside of Amman, where it is rare to find women participating in the formal economy, are exactly where the USAID Sustainable Cultural Heritage Through Engagement of Local Communities Project (SCHEP) has chosen to work. SCHEP supports projects in Irbid, Mafraq, Madaba, Ghawr as Safi, Busayra, Petra, Bir Madhkur, Wadi Ramm, and Aqaba. Although SCHEP was not concieved as a project focused on gender, it has worked since 2014 to empower women and girls to further their education and professional development through cultural heritage programming.

In February 2017 at a celebration of SCHEP trainees working at the site of Tawahin as Sukkar in Ghawr as Safi, roughly one fourth of the graduates were women. They received training in both museum management and archaeological object conservation. Hibbah Bowwat, one of the trainees, passionately described her work conserving mosaics while fielding questions with confidence and poise, during a tour of the conservation labs. “She’s really doing amazing work—they all are,” said Ghawr as Safi project director Dr. Konstantinos Politis proudly about Hibbah and the rest of the trainees.

But women around the world are rarely allowed to focus solely on their professional trajectories, and are often expected to put in a full day’s work and then come home to look after their families. Indeed, the female trainees helped clean up after the lunch served in their honor.

Tahani al Salhi, the Director of Cultural Resource Management at the Petra Archaeological Park (PAP), spoke to these same challenges during the opening dinner of the week-long capacity building workshop held for SCHEP Site Stewards. “I had work today, of course. Then I went home and made [dinner] for my family and then I came here. But at least here I just get to eat and not cook the whole thing,” she laughed to the table.

A native of the conservative Ma’an governorate, Tahani is well aqcuainted with the challenge women face working in Jordan, especially in the field of conservation. “People think they know what it is we do, and many times they think not very nice things. They say this work is not right for women,” she says. But Tahani, who has worked at PAP for 21 years, never let this discourage her. Instead, she worked to boost transparency to let the local community see her work first hand to dispell any rumors.

Being a woman, Tahani says, actually made her a better employee and manager. “I had to work twice as hard, and I couldn’t make any mistakes,” she said. “People tried to make many challenges and problems for me.” Even now, as the head of her own division, she still faces obstacles. “None of the men who work for me [have problems]. They know me and we are a good team, a family. But from some of the men outside [my department]? Of course. They think they can make problems for me but they don’t understand how strong I am.”

Tahani now manages a team of seven regular employees and various workmen depending on the specific project. Five of them are women, which Tahani says is no accident. She has worked to make her office condusive to female employment, including flexible hours, collaboration, and a family-friendly environment. But she says this has only worked to make her office stronger. “The women here, they work hard and they earn this. Many of them started out without pay, just to learn and to improve themselves,” she said. “If you want to see women in conservation, you are in the right place.”

“People come down here all the time and they say ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this with all women and especially in the south [of Jordan].’ But we know this is normal. This is what women can do,” Tahani says proudly.

At the department’s morning meeting, Tahani’s office is full by 8 am with her team. “We’re here earlier than the men,” she notes with pride. Samia al Falahat is in charge of monitoring the entirety of the park, visiting and reporting on every site. Her information then informs the plan put in place by the conservation team of Wajd al Nawafleh and Sanaa al Rawajfeh.

Wajd, trained at ACOR and previously employed at the Temple of the Winged Lions, and her counterpart Sanaa, are in charge of carrying out interventions throughout the park. Although they say they are confident in their abilites, Wajd says that she is unafraid to ask for help, particularly from ACOR or the Temple of the Winged Lions staff. She is equally eager to learn more to be able to take on more projects independently. As she lists off her training and accomplishments she says, “I took the SCHEP GIS training and I’m ready for more.”

Khirat al Farajat, a geologist who works on conservation projects with PAP, says that being a woman makes her better at her job. “We look at things in a different way than the men working on these projects. We see different ways to solve the many problems here.”

Areej al Farajat, who works on digital documentation for PAP, says that one of the best parts of her job is being surrounded by strong women who support each other. When asked why she chose this job (her university major was information technology), she grins, points to Tahani, and simply says, “Her.”

These themes of creative problem solving and mutual support are not unique to the women at PAP. Eman Abdessalaam, the founder of Sela, the local nonprofit company that SCHEP has awarded to implement community training programs at the Temple of the Winged Lions, echoes these values in her everyday actions.

Eman, a single mother of two, exudes quiet confidence leading visitors around the site, talking to journalists, and handling the administrative side of Sela. However, she really comes alive when she talks about her own work as a documentation specialist. Eman, normally reserved, will talk at length when asked to explain some aspect of the process or one of her drawings. It’s a passion that she passed along to Halemah al Nawafleh, the documenation assistant at the Temple of the Winged Lions. When asked why she chose Halemah, Eman just said, “she’s the best.”

Halemah delivered an impressive and thorough presentation on photography for the SCHEP Site Stewards workshop, using humor and her own experiences, positive and negative, to keep the room in rapt attention.

Halemah and Eman are an impressive team, but they are certainly not the only women on the Temple of the Winged Lions team. The project employs a gender-blind hiring system and the results are visible to anyone who visits the site. Ageleh Jmeidi and Khatima Jdeilat are the unofficial matriarchs of the project. During a lunch break, the rowdy group working on the site falls silent to hear them speak. They are key figures training new employees and showing visitors what life on an archaeological site is actual like, instructing visitors in how to wash pottery, sew sandbags, or sift through excavation dump piles. Both Ageleh and Khatima are supported by SCHEP through Sela, which works to continually teach them new skills, whether related directly to cultural heritage or in how to give tours and interact with tourists.

Safaa al Rfooah, one of the SCHEP Site Stewards in Busayra, eagerly took notes during the Site Steward Capacity Building Workshop in Petra and was intent on finding ways to incorporate the newly learned skills into her own day-to-day work. “We need more of these,” she noted earnestly and then began listing all of the areas where she wanted to learn more and improve.

Women across Jordan face barriers to entering the workforce, particularly in the fields of tourism and cultural heritage, where SCHEP is most active. SCHEP’s own Communications Assistant, Shatha Abu Aballi mused, “When I told people I was going to get my Masters in this field they said to me, ‘You’re crazy! What will you do?’ but now…”

Shatha has both a BA and MA in cultural heritage related fields from Hashemite University. She was first introduced to the project via the SCHEP Scholars program, a fund that provided scholarships for high-achieving Jordanian students to attend the prestigious International Conference on the History and Archaeology of Jordan, held in May 2016 in Amman. More than half of the recipients were women.

The accomplishments of these women, in Petra and beyond, are their own. They are women of determination, intelligence, tenacity, and grit. While SCHEP in no way claims their successes, the project is proud to support their efforts, and the efforts of women like them through intensive trainings, workshops, and both technical and logistical support. SCHEP funding, and ACOR’s before it, gave many of the women mentioned in this article the tangible skills that they use on the job every day. SCHEP is committed to continuing this work, bolstering the capacity of Jordan’s many and diverse communities, and the women working within them.

Written by Sofia Smith, USAID SCHEP Communications Officer

This blog article is not official U.S. Government information and does not necessarily represent the views or positions of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the U.S. Government.

The post How Women Are Taking the Lead in Preserving Jordan’s Past appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

Since joining ACOR’s Board of Trustees in 2012, I have been fascinated by the Temple of the Winged Lions Cultural Resource Management (TWLCRM) Initiative’s focus on empowering local women in the Petra region. An award-winning, breakthrough project, the TWLCRM has worked hard to develop a gender-blind, egalitarian hiring system in which women receive equal opportunity and equal pay to work.

When hiring first began under the project’s Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation grant back in 2012, only a few women were involved with the project; by the next year, when I visited Petra with ACOR Board President Randy Old and his wife Jody, nearly 100 women had been employed, mostly as participants in two informal cooperatives organized to produce the several thousand sandbags needed for the project.

Since manufactured sandbags are not readily available in Jordan, the cooperatives modify used burlap rice bags to fulfill the same function. First, the cooperative leaders distribute empty rice bags to local women who want to work and whose families are most in need of the extra income. The women then modify the bags by sewing them into the needed size and shape, after which they are taken to the Temple of the Winged Lions site and filled with “clean” soil produced from the sifting of old excavation dumps. Once filled, the bags are sewn closed by another team of local women, ready to be used to bolster, stabilize, and protect the temple’s fragile sandstone walls.

When I visited Petra in 2013, I spoke with three women—Ageleh Jmeidi, Khatima Jdeilat, and Jawar Jdeliat—who had become leaders in the local cooperatives. For all, the opportunity not just to work but to contribute and lead means a lot. “The work is good and it’s helping with the monthly bills and so there’s more opportunity for my children to go to school and to study,” said Ageleh, who has since become one of the project’s core permanent team members. “We feel we have more opportunity and are not just sitting in the house.” Later, I learned that Ageleh was able to use her initial income from the project to renovate her entire house.

Ageleh also noted how working for the TWLCRM has brought more stability to her family’s income. “Before working [on the team] I sold souvenirs in Petra, but I knew the income was not sufficient or certain,” she said. “[My income] is now more consistent. I have two daughters at university, and the other daughter will now be able to go, too.” All of the women expressed how encouraging their families were regarding their employment, and Jawar even added proudly that her son worked for the TWLCRM as well and hoped he would do so for a long time.

Some women on the Temple of the Winged Lions project are also being trained in more technical skills. Eman Abdelsallam has worked with the TWLCRM since 2013 and has gradually risen to become the project’s lead Documentation Specialist and, more recently, the president of Sela, a local non-profit company specializing in vocational training in cultural heritage preservation.

When I spoke with Eman in 2013, I was thrilled to see how much she enjoyed her work, especially the degree to which it had positively impacted both her life and the lives of her children. Eman, a former teacher, often brings her two young children, Maria and Hossam, to the site and to project events so they, too, can experience the job she loves so much. She enjoys the camaraderie of being on a team and, whenever asked, expresses a quite passion for the work she is doing. “[The work] changed my whole life,” she said.

Written by Anne Dunn

An ACOR Board Member since 2012, Anne Dunn is an avid archaeology and travel enthusiast who now visits Jordan regularly to experience firsthand its fascinating history and heritage. She received a B.A. in English Literature from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, has a Master of Arts in Education degree from Seton Hall University, and also earned a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York.

The ACOR Blog is proud to feature the stories of supporters like Anne who appreciate the positive role ACOR plays in Petra and communities throughout Jordan. Please e-mail us at acor@acorjordan.org to tell us why you support ACOR, or click here to learn how you can give back to ACOR and Jordan.

The post The Women of the TWLCRM appeared first on ACOR Jordan.