The Department of Community and Public Health has been in existence at the University of Bir Zeit since the 1980s; it became the Institute of Community and Public Health in 1998. It has been active in teaching, training, the production of educational materials, research for policy formulation, feasibility studies as well as the establishment of data bases on different aspects of health and health care.
SDC has supported the Institute since 1994, in the field of environment & health in the rural context. This topic has become an important issue with the rapid growth of urbanisation in the Palestinian areas. In combination with the impact of the ongoing conflict, the negative consequences of these trends on Palestinian public health have been substantial. Preoccupation with the immediate problems created by the conflict has also made people less interested and less aware of environment related problems. Nevertheless environmental issues continue to form an important part of SDCs programme, not only in Palestine, but also in the wider region.
The programme considers as its long term goals the improvement of environmental health structures, processes and awareness in Palestine. This general goal translates into two strategic objectives for the coming phase. The first is to broaden awareness of environmental issues at the community level mainly through concentrating on the school environment. The second objective is to build and demonstrate models of change in relation to planned urbanisation. The target groups for this objective are environmental health committee at the local level, food inspection systems, NGOs and government hospitals in relation to medical waste, authorities dealing with solid waste disposal, etc.
Taking into account the prevailing security and political context, the new phase will focus on mid level operators and managers. Best practices and models of success will be developed to demonstrate how problems related to environmental health can be solved and thus serve as an example for future policy making by the Palestinian Authority. Its inbuilt flexibility will allow the programme to invest itself in policy and systemic change at the national level should the situation improve in the coming years.
The programme and the Institute will also invest in improving the quality of their planning, monitoring and all over management. For this reason the programme foresees the use of an expatriate consultant to assist the Institute and its staff in this endeavour. Based upon the positive experiences made during the external review cum planning mission in the spring of 2004, the same consultant will be contracted for the follow-up missions.
This investment by SDC in capacity building not only on the operational level, but on the organisational, management and planning level is an important part of its support to the programme. Given the general weakness in strategic planning, priority setting and management among the Palestinian partner organisations, the model of adding an “organisational support package” to the funding of programme activities will be adopted with other partners as well. It is in our view essential in order to move organisations towards more professionalism, increased sustainability and diversification in donor funding.
