About Near East Foundation

For 95 years, the Near East Foundation (NEF) has worked to improve conditions of the most vulnerable communities in the Middle East and Africa. Their vulnerability is rooted in chronic poverty, conflict, migration and climate change.

In 1915, NEF was created to provide refuge and relief to Armenians facing persecution during the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Today, the vulnerable communities with which NEF works take many forms:

  • Marginalized social groups – young people in Morocco’s peri-urban slums, residents of “poverty pockets” in rural Jordan;
  • Villages isolated by their environment – Berbers in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, Malians facing an encroaching desert, Egyptian farmers relocated from the Nile Delta, and rural Armenians cut off from economic opportunity; and
  • People fleeing conflict – Iraqis in Jordan and Syria, Palestinians in the West Bank and Darfurians in central Sudan.

What these groups hold in common is that they are excluded from opportunities for economic and social advancement taking place around them. They lack the power to influence public decision-making and access to educational opportunities. They are left behind, caught in “poverty traps” that prevent them from investing in their own economic or social development.

Knowledge, Voice, and Enterprise

NEF assists its local partners to participate more fully in the development of their countries—to build the lives they envision for themselves. Through a range of training, technical assistance and material support, NEF helps vulnerable communities:

  • Access knowledge necessary to participate fully in civic and economic life through education, job training, and literacy programs
  • Amplify their collective voice through community organizing and institutional strengthening initiatives
  • Create economic opportunity through enterprise development, micro-credit, and improved agricultural and natural resource management

The Near East Foundation Difference

With an annual budget of approximately $6 million, NEF maintains offices and programs in Armenia, Egypt, Jordan, Mali, Morocco, Palestine and Sudan. In the field, approximately 85 NEF staff members—all of whom are from the countries in which they work—work closely with local organizations to mobilize vulnerable communities to find homegrown solutions to their problems. A small staff based in the US provides program development, project management, and administrative support to teams in the field. NEF is particularly effective at working in difficult settings for several reasons:

  • Decentralization. NEF’s decentralized structure empowers local development professionals. Most of our technical capacity and programming capacity resides with the teams in the field. This allows NEF to design initiatives that are especially responsive to local need and tailored to local conditions. Our field programs evolve organically with the changing nature of local development challenges, as reflected in the growing importance of urban poverty reduction initiatives in Morocco (Casablanca), Egypt (Cairo), and Jordan (Zarqa).
  • Relationships. NEF has sustained its presence in partner countries and communities over many years. These long-term relationships give us intimate knowledge of local circumstances and challenges. Just as important, the relationships and NEF’s local reputation are a foundation for trust with groups that are often difficult to reach—such as residents of remote villages in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains, refugees in urban Jordan, and Palestinian farmers in the West Bank.
  • Innovation. NEF’s local capacity and long-standing relationships enable NEF to pilot and refine innovative solutions to local development challenges. While our activities are rooted in grassroots action, the approaches and tools we develop gain traction far beyond the communities in which we work. For example, local natural resource management bylaws, developed by NEF and its partners in northern Mali, are now common elements of development practice throughout West Africa. NEF’s locally adapted models for micro-credit and small enterprise development are now widely used by NGOs throughout Jordan. And NEF’s model of engaging communities to increase girls’ education, piloted in a handful of villages in the High Atlas Mountains, is now used across southern Morocco and is on the cusp of expansion to the national level.