We are dedicated to improving the lives of women in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon.
Inaash — the Association for the Development of Palestinian Camps — has worked since 1969 to keep Palestinian embroidery alive and to provide a livelihood for the women who create it.
Our Mission
Skill, beauty and empowerment through the point of a needle.
Maximizing employment opportunities for Palestinian female artisans one stitch at a time, by producing high-quality, hand-made traditional embroidery.
Our Vision
Keeping heritage alive, relevant and desirable.
Embroidery is the living heritage of Palestine, transferred from mother to daughter through the ages. Our vision is to conserve it, promote its beauty, and keep it relevant in today’s world on behalf of those who produce it.
Our Impact
Across the generations.
Since its inception in 1969, Inaash has impacted the lives of over 9,000 women refugees by providing training, income and even early education for their children. It currently supports over 350 women in five camps.
How It Began
Lebanon hosts close to 450,000 Palestinian refugees across 12 camps, where conditions are notoriously difficult: employment is limited and unemployment among men is extremely high, while traditionally women rarely sought work outside their immediate surroundings. Living on aid was neither sufficient nor conducive to wellbeing.
It was these social problems that led Huguette Bechara El Khoury — daughter of Lebanon’s first President — to establish Inaash, creating employment and income for refugee women confined to the camps. The one transferable skill the women had brought with them was traditional embroidery.
Over five decades Inaash has worked to preserve this culture and harness it as a livelihood across some five camps. Since inception, over 8,000 women have benefited — in income, and through a sense of community and continuity — passing the skill from mother to daughter, with a positive impact on their families.