USAID Connecting Palestinian Youth Clubs in Cyberspace: Through the Ruwwad Youth Empowerment Project, USAID is facilitating increased cooperation between three large USAID-supported Youth Development Resource Centers and their 30 affiliated clubs by providing all of them with high-speed internet connectivity and setting up Virtual Private Networks (VPN). This will open up access to new resources for youth in marginalized areas and open possibilities for coordinated efforts on youth initiatives throughout the West Bank. The new links will facilitate collaborative work on multimedia projects, online training possibilities, video conferencing, and provide other virtual sharing activities.

USAID Helping the West Bank/Gaza Go Green: With the Palestinian Authority beginning to institutionalize “green” thinking into legislation and the private sector acknowledging that environmentally-friendly building is the new standard, the first in a series of USAID-supported, green-building workshops attracted a wide range of academia, government officials and private contractors. This workshop, part of USAID’s efforts to promote green practices in the region, focused on possibilities to locally apply solutions like adaptive reuse and the “green” retrofitting of existing buildings to make them more energy and water efficient.

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