A series of meetings around JICA-supported initiatives in Gaza brought together practitioners, programme officers, and business owners to look honestly at what development support achieves — and where it stops short.
The themes that kept returning
- Technical support — equipment and software matter, but only alongside the training to use them well.
- Women entrepreneurs — access to networks and markets is more often the constraint than ambition or skill.
- Capacity building — programmes work best when they run long enough for participants to finish real projects.
- Access to markets — connecting local production to buyers outside the region remains the hardest and most valuable step.
Rozza’s contribution to these conversations comes from a decade of running training programmes alongside a working studio. The pattern is consistent: people learn quickly when the exercise is a real client brief rather than a hypothetical one.
What comes next
We continue to work with institutional partners on programme design, creative curriculum, and mentoring — and to argue that creative industries deserve a place in economic development planning, not only in cultural programming.