Throughout Bank of Palestine’s continuous efforts in the field of banking awareness to women and their encouragement to take initiative and enter the economic life, the Bank conducted 33 workshops throughout the past year, dedicated to motivate business women, women entrepreneurs and Palestinian women in various Palestinian governorates. The workshops were attended with around 900 women entrepreneurs, through collaboration with a number of Palestinian institutions that aims to enhance the role of Palestinian women.
The workshops focused on the Bank’s development and social roles and on clarifying the banking business concepts, types of financial services, and how they can benefit from these services to advance their businesses, including: definition of a bank, the need for banking services and access to these services, accounts and deposits, checks, credit facilitations, types of cards and their usage and features, international financial remittances, electronic banking services and other needed services through “Felestineyeh” program’s “Know your Bank for Banking Awareness” that aims to increase the banking awareness for women.
These workshops were organized due Bank of Palestine’s belief in the importance of empowering Palestinian women. The Bank believes that women’s empowerment begins with ensuring them with equality of rights and job duties inside the Bank, and by providing a comfortable and compatible work environment for female employees and grant special privileges for working mothers, as the bank worked over the years to increase the number of female employees; by the end of year 2015, 32% of the Bank’s employees were women, compared to 17% in 2008. The bank aims to increase the percentage of female employees to 50% and increase the number of women in senior management positions as well.
Bank of Palestine conducted these workshops as part of a program for non-financial advisory services offered by the Bank, which contributes in empowering businesses and encourage their owners for continuous development to their businesses, including both customers and non-customers of Bank of Palestine; the Bank launched the business development tools service (Business Toolkit), which provides needed forms, contracts and consultations from experts in various fields, in addition to several other services in the fields of business planning, marketing, human resources management, registration and financing. These tools will contribute to help and support women and meet their needs to guarantee advancement of their businesses or the establishment of promising businesses and projects.
These efforts are parallel to the Bank’s establishment to an exclusive Facebook page for Palestine women, under the title “Felestineyeh”, to form as a communication bridge between the Bank and the Palestinian women and act as media outlet for their businesses and success stories.
Other steps taken by the Bank to support women to enter the labor market include joining a number of memberships, including the Global Banking Alliance for Women, which is a leading international alliance in the field of financial institutions and associations interested in advancing women around the world. Bank of Palestine is the first Palestinian banking institution to become a member in this alliance, which keeps the Bank informed about the best practices related to providing banking services to women, in addition to sharing information and experience, and receiving the needed resources. In addition to enhancing the Bank’s ability to provide banking services to women in the best possible manner, and raise the awareness about the economic role of women, as customers, investors and entrepreneurs, in creating job opportunities and building productive businesses.
Bank of Palestine is committed to Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs), which is a joint initiative between United Nations Global Compact and United Nations Women, and provides guidelines on empowering women in the workplace, labor market and the society.