Baseline Assessment of Women’s Business Skills in Za’atari Refugee Camp

The baseline assessment of business skills was designed to assess the capacities of women in Za’atari Refugee Camp in order to be used as a baseline for developing the detailed educational plan as well as targeted curricula aligned to the capacities of the participants.

A face-to-face individual interviews were adopted to collect data and information for this report, including qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis to data collected.

Based on the data collected, the following results have been achieved:

1. Preparing the educational plan;
2. Drafting the curricula and selecting the learning content, including the activities and worksheets; and
3. Drafting the selection criteria of the participants and selecting the list of participants;

METHODOLOGY

Development of Data Collection Tool

SRD team grouped the relevant information planned to collect into the following categories: 

1. basic information; 
2. core business skills; and 
3. business status. 

With guidance from UN Women staff, both in Amman Office and in the field in Za’atari Refugee Camp, who suggest changes and provide culturally appropriate guidance that would make our questionnaire easier to interpret and understand. Once we had a working draft of the questionnaire, we trained our field staff (enumerators) to conduct pilot interviews to ensure that the questionnaire questions were clear and relevant to the potential concerns of participants. Once we had a version of the questionnaire that we were all comfortable with, we translated it to Arabic language.

Field Research and Data Collection

We conducted rapid and extensive field research in Za’atari Refugee Camp during the last week of February 2017, in order to evaluate the current business skills and business status of women in Za’atari Refugee Camp. This information will be used to guide the design and development of the training program and to create a set of baseline metrics against which to measure future progress. Several specific quantitative indicators were developed based on the assessment results.

The qualitative information generated through the face-to-face interviews. Each respondent was informed of the purpose of their participation and the confidentiality of their responses. In order for the survey results to be generalized to the target beneficiary population, a minimum sample size of 80 respondents was critical. By the end of the field research, we had conducted 82 surveys among potential beneficiaries in the districts covered by UN Women in Za’atari Refugee Camp. The quantitative data was analyzed in Excel and SPSS. Percentages of the frequencies of different responses for each question were calculated in Excel while regressions, odds ratios, cross-tabulations were calculated using SPSS to draw relationships between responses to different questions.

RESULTS

Socio-Demographic Information

The ages of the women surveyed ranged from 19 to 58. The average age of the women surveyed was 35 years, with 40% of the women falling within the range of 31 to 40. The majority of the women were married (72%), one tenth of the women were widowed (11%), single/never married (10%), and a small percentage were separated/divorced (6%).

While 98% of women surveyed had attended school, the majority (67%) had not made it past preparatory school, which indicates that overall education levels are relatively low. Only women cannot read and only two women completed Bachelor degree.

Women’s Business Skills

The report concludes that women in Za’atari Refugee Camp are mostly caring for their families. These women struggle with a lack of resources, empowerment, and access to services. The women with whom we spoke are eager to acquire new business skills and to start their businesses. The following table shows the baseline level of each indicator we used in the assessment of the business development skills and capacities.