This is a charitable development project that aims at helping poor families to secure a permanent income by themselves, reducing unemployment, and reviving basic professions, through small projects with the loan system for needy families.

Several years have now passed since the beginning of the crisis that afflicted the Syrians who are accustomed to lending a hand to other people in need. This crisis has affected all aspects of life. Men, breadwinners of their families, have lost their jobs. They feel helpless, looking at their hungry children with little they can do because of soaring prices and scarcity of products on the market. They are forced to stand in line for food baskets that are distributed to the needy.

To help people avoid being dependent on charity, Al-Sham Humanitarian Foundation, in partnership with the Sheikh Thani Bin Abdullah Establishment for Services (RAF), has launched the Food Earning Project in Daraa, Idleb, and Al-Ghouta in January 2016. This project consists of micro-project loan system for families with a good experience in farming and industry. The families do own the projects after paying part of the loan in accordance with mechanisms and standards appropriate to the Syrian situation.

This project includes 65 smaller projects in a variety of fields (vocational, agricultural, industrial, and animal husbandry), and has created 85 jobs and benefited about 14000 residents of these areas per month.

The project aims to:

• Help families have sufficient income to live on.
• Produce new stuff that contributes to meeting the needs of the market periodically.
• Revive some of the basic occupations that have been destroyed by the crisis.
• Help reduce unemployment.
• Enforcing the work culture and enhancing people’s self-reliance.

The Foundation has set up specific standards in the process of selecting the families that are eligible for help:

• Families that have lost their breadwinners and are still able to work.
• Families who have experience in the project presented to them.
• Families with special needs or war injuries.
• Family members should not be fewer than five.

This project has proved a success, and, therefore, the Foundation is seeking to increase the number of beneficiary families in other areas. However, there will always be room for extra work needed to extend help to poor families.