The PNU Promising Research Center for Social Research and Women Studies, represented by Dr. Sara bint Saleh al-Khashmi, Center Director, participated with a paper in the conference titled “Small Projects and Productive Families as a Tributary to Development: The Roleof Municipalities, the Public and Private Sectors, and the Civil Society in their Success”. The conference was held in Amman, Jordan.
The center’s participation comes as part of the invitation extended by the organizers of the conference; the Arab Institute for the Development of Cities, in cooperation with the Ministry of Social Development and the Ministry of Municipalities’ Affairs in Jordan, and the Arab Gulf Program for Development (AGFUND). The conference revolves around a number of themes; namely, identification of contemporary economic variables and their economic and social impacts on the pace of development; the reality of small projects and productive families and their impacts in societies and development; assessment of SMEs and their impact on societies and sustainable development; identification of methods for handling the negative aspects of the small projects and productive families and possibilities of encouragement and support; review of the leading experiences in supporting small projects and productive families; development of a communication network between the institutions working in the field of small projects and productive families, youth employment, and confrontation of poverty.
The paper presented by Dr. Sara al-Khashmi, titled “Role of Productive Families in Enabling Impoverished Saudi Women”, discussed the obstacles facing the productive families projects; determining comparison points between the productive families for the impoverished women supported by the social safety networks and the high-income productive families and the companies providing the same products; and determining mechanisms for activating the role of productive families projects to enable impoverished Saudi women in particular and as a means for social safety networks in the KSA in general.
The most prominent mechanisms for activating the role of productive families projects determined by the study were: integrating recurring cash aids that are disbursed to beneficiaries by the social safety networks with the annual cash inflation rate in light of the nature of the general budget of the state; including all owners of productive families projects under the umbrella of social insurance as part of employee safety; supporting the partnership strategy between the social safety networks that aim to enable impoverished women in the Saudi society and the implementation of programs through joint councils and authorities that need to be founded to activate the partnership between the public and private sectors; attempting to integrate minimum wages with the cash value of the sufficiency line in light of the nature of the general budget of the state; and finding a main official reference authority for productive families, represented by the establishment of a national center for embracing the projects of productive families and aiming to set the financing, administrative, productive, and marketing policies for such projects.
