Five Months, 86 Lives Changed
The numbers tell one story: 86 youth reached, 59% of them women, 14 businesses seeded, and a 21% average income increase among participants. But behind those figures is a more demanding one - a project that compressed what would normally take a full year into roughly five months, under movement restrictions, staff transitions, and an economy contracting in real time.
The MA'AN West Bank Incubation Hub Project, funded through DanChurchAid (DCA) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), ran from April to December 2025. It targeted low-income Palestinian youth aged 20-35 across the West Bank, with a focus on women, recent graduates, unemployed youth, and small-scale producers seeking a path into sustainable self-employment. The project built directly on MA'AN's earlier incubation work in Gaza, relocated following the 2023 conflict, and delivered through the Innovation Hub now established in Ramallah.
Hackathon and bootcamp: From ideas to investment: the competitive pipeline
The project's core model moved participants through a competitive incubation pipeline. A hackathon drew 24 youth to develop and pitch early-stage business ideas; 30 more joined the bootcamp for deeper business development support. The top performers from both tracks received seed funding - 6 hackathon winners and 8 bootcamp winners, with two additional bootcamp participants added through a budget reallocation that made efficient use of currency exchange savings. Each seed fund recipient used the capital to purchase tools, equipment, and complete necessary construction for their project.
The businesses that emerged were grounded in local realities: a 3D printer workshop in Jenin, a strawberry greenhouse in Araba, a biogas system in Maythaloun, and a water reservoir in Arrana that, in its owner's own words, enabled her to "scale up my agricultural project." A participant working with bees described being able to "produce bee queens and use them in my own hives and sell them to local farmers" - a small but concrete shift toward economic independence.
Master courses: Online learning at scale
A third track - the Master Course program - enrolled 32 youth in an online curriculum covering the financial, legal, operational, and technical dimensions of running a business. The courses were produced as video content across 37 sessions, delivered via the Hub's digital portal. Six participants who completed the program received additional branding and product development coaching. While dropout rates were higher than anticipated - partly due to the absence of financial incentives for completion - the program still reached participants across multiple cities and contributed to a digital platform infrastructure that will remain available long after the project ends.
What the data shows: Early income gains and honest limitations
A baseline survey conducted in July 2025 recorded an average monthly income of 1,568 NIS among employed participants. An endline survey in January 2026 - six months later - showed average incomes of 2,310 NIS for employed participants and 1,730 NIS for the self-employed, with a combined average of 1,891 NIS representing a 21% increase. Sixty percent of participants reported improved income and employment opportunities at endline, compared to 17% at baseline.
The project is candid about the limits of these findings: a five-month window is genuinely insufficient to measure the full impact of an incubation model. Income gains were most pronounced among seed fund recipients, and the project's own lessons-learned assessment recommends multi-phase programming, extended incubation cycles, and dedicated post-training income tracking for any future phases.
People and inclusion: Women, green economy, and youth ownership
Women constituted 59% of all participants - exceeding the planned 50% minimum. Gender-sensitive design ran throughout: flexible hybrid delivery to accommodate mobility constraints, safeguarding protocols, and gender-disaggregated data collected across all indicators. The majority of supported businesses fell within green or agribusiness categories, reflecting both participant interests and the project's emphasis on climate-smart enterprise. A Youth Ambassadors program engaged trained young people as peer facilitators and community outreach focal points, strengthening local ownership of the project.
The project reached an estimated 344 people indirectly through participant households, and generated 12,800 social media impressions through the Hub's channels - a digital presence that will continue serving youth entrepreneurs in the West Bank well beyond the project's conclusion.
