Achoti, Tel Aviv, Israel
While the media has focused on the violence surrounding the Intifada al-Aqsa (the Palestinian uprising), few reports have emerged about the severe economic consequences the violence has had on the Israeli economy.
As factories and businesses close, women of all ethnic groups – Mizrahi, Sephardic, Arab, Russian, Ethiopian, Bedouin – are losing their jobs. Poor, uneducated and marginalized, most of these women are unable to obtain social services from overwhelmed government agencies. The hardest hit are Mizrahi women, who have emigrated from Arab countries such as Yemen and Morocco. Mizrahi are not easily accepted into Israeli life – they face cultural and ethnic discrimination that forces them to take lower-paying jobs where they often face sexual harassment and poor working conditions.
Achoti formed in 1999 to address the rights and status of women workers in factories and respond to the flood of new Mizrahi job-seekers. Through a joint partnership with several Israeli women's groups (including other GFW grantees), Achoti counsels women on negotiating better pay and working conditions, teaches women their rights as workers, and offers skills training to the unemployed.
Achoti's most critical work lies in its commitment to stand side-by-side with women challenging illegal practices in the workplace. In Beer-Sheva in the South, Achoti worked with a group of Ethiopian women who cleaned municipal offices. When the employer went bankrupt, the new firm reduced the hours of work, cut the women's salaries in half and made the women clean the homes of elderly men. Uncomfortable with entering the homes of men unaccompanied, the women worked with Achoti to find a solution: to create a cooperative cleaning service, which allowed them to set their own working conditions and salaries.
Achoti means "sister," and the group approaches its work in true sisterhood. Regardless of religious, ethnic and cultural differences, Achoti supports any poor and disenfranchised woman. Through field researchers and counselors, Achoti reaches out to minority groups throughout Israel: in the North, where Arab women are exploited in agriculture; in Tel-Aviv, where pockets of deep poverty co-exist with upper-middleclass neighborhoods; in Jerusalem, where Orthodox women face resistance to their ways of surviving divorce, violence in the home and single parenthood; and in the South, where severe lack of infrastructure exists in Bedouin neighborhoods. In 2001, the Global Fund for Women awarded Achoti a grant of $10,000 to expand its outreach to Bedouin communities. Achoti's success in working with diverse populations lies in its belief that "working on equal footing ... has encouraged trust in working together. In a society which is torn apart at the seams ... this is indeed a great stride forward." 