Women Supporting Women

  
Dalia’s through WSW program aims at; putting decision-making in the hands of grassroots women, enabling them from defining and answering to their priorities, activating the role of the Palestinian Diaspora in the developmental process, utilizing resources that already exist and encourage grantees direct accountability to their local constituency rather than an external donors.  
“Women Supporting Women” (WSW) is a program that builds leadership through “culture change” in women’s and villages networks. WSW empowers and trains women, through direct experience, to decide how to use community development resources and mobilize their own capacities – both as individuals and in women’s networks – to strengthen their assets and increase their impact. We hope to contribute to women’s empowerment and leadership within their families and communities, improved development practice, and the long-term sustainability of women’s groups and networks through sharing resources.  
Program Objectives

  •  Put decision-making about grant funds in the hands of grassroots women by asking them to responsibly and professionally evaluate their work, as well as the work of their peers.
  • Empower women to decide themselves who their own leaders are, and enable the development of leadership towards the implementation of the inspirational initiatives.
  •  Invest various types of support (training, advice, encouragement, and small grants) in promising women leaders in a targeted geographic area.
  •  Develop new relationships among grassroots women’s activists and small groups that be sustained beyond the project period.  

Implementation Methodology: 
Preoperational Phase:
In preparation, Dalia Association will develop all the project formats, as well as compile a jury of community activists and professionals in different sectors (finance, women’s capacity-building, etc.) who are familiar with the communities in question and who will take on the task of evaluating the project applications.
Phase 1  

  • We will identify and build rapport with women in a cluster of underserved villages: meeting with local councils and women’s organizations, going on field visits to municipalities, and conducting surveys both to familiarize ourselves with the communities’ needs and priorities and to inform the jury about the targeted villages. We will rely on both quantitative and qualitative indicators to select these villages, and we will continue to use both these methods to evaluate the projects as they proceed
  •  Taking into consideration what we’ve learned from these meetings and assessments, we will develop our selection criteria according to the communities’ stated priorities. We will use community outreach (women’s unions and networks, community events and publications, etc.) to advertise the availability of small grants for small women’s groups and make the application accessible. These criteria will inform the jury about the communities,
  •  The jury will then screen and study the applications based on the determined criteria, rank them accordingly, and prioritize them based on the rank each one obtains.
  • Dalia Association will carry out an initial meeting session with the shortlisted applicants, involving an in-depth questionnaire, early in the process. One final advanced meeting session by Dalia Association and the evaluation jury will be carried out with the institutions that received the highest number of votes in order to discuss their proposed projects in more detail.
  •  After this point, we will finalize the decisions and officially inform the groups of their acceptance.  

Phase II

  • The selected women’s groups/organizations will begin the process of implementing their projects and activities, taking into account the contributions of the larger community, the responsible utilization of local resources and the women groups’ role in activating the role of the Palestinian Diaspora in the developmental process of the Palestinian community.
  •  Dalia Association will work collaboratively with the selected women’s groups in order to build their capacities – according to their own priorities within the program’s objectives.
  • We will form a Monitoring and Evaluation Committee, comprised of individuals from the community itself, to provide supervision and feedback. This will strengthen collaboration and communication between the grantees and their villages, make the grantees directly accountable to their local constituency rather than an external body, and improve transparency in general.
  •  The programs will be externally evaluated by a third party, selected by but operating independently from Dalia Association.
  •  We will hold open meetings attended by local, organizations, and individuals from the community. There, the grantees can present their financial and management reporting and describe their progress; the local monitoring and evaluation committee can present their reports as well; and an open discussion / Q&A can take place between the grantees and the audience.

 

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