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Anera conducted this assessment of the tech ecosystem in Palestine to inform our career accelerator program strategy and to provide a resource for other actors working on programs in the same space.
Our assessment and narrative comes from 34 extensive interviews with tech leaders in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem. Interviewees include university professors, incubator/accelerator executives, company leaders, and talented IT professionals. Some portion of the data and statistics we include come solely from one or more of the interviewees. Reliable data about the Palestine tech sector are scarce, so these conversations with experts provide a useful analysis and fill some gaps. We also rely upon the excellent reports produced by the World Bank, Swiss Development Cooperation, and the European Union, which we cite throughout the document.
Anera’s PLUS (People Leveling Up Skills) IT upskilling program started with a pilot in 2019. The program graduated three cohorts of students from an intensive 20-week training in full-stack software development and achieved a 92% job placement rate. Anera is using the lessons learned from that pilot and the research conducted for this report to refine and grow our program.
Several discussions with major local companies in the region helped us assess market requirements by providing a better understanding of companies’ struggles, hiring needs, and the skills that are most in demand. Anera is re-designing our PLUS program so that it achieves maximum community-driven impact and benefit to local Palestinian youth.