The Business Startups Incubators Support project (BSIS) supports young Palestinian entrepreneurs to develop their ideas into viable businesses. Recently BSIS has organised a number of awareness sessions and bootcamps to promote entrepreneurship around the country. Sessions have been organised on different occasions in the major cities - Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Gaza - around the country. These meetings were an opportunity for young people to become aware of the available entrepreneurship opportunities across the Palestinian Territory.  

A more specific awareness session on the Tourism sector took place in Bethlehem. The focus of this session was the recent challenges the sector faces in attracting tourists to Bethlehem and in providing the desired services to them. After the brief explanation about the situation, the participants were given the time to ask questions to the members of the panel. At the end of the discussion, participants were asked to collect information on the problems and work on creating various solutions. Afterwards a Tourism Hackathon was organised in Bethlehem. This is a 2-days meeting aimed to tackling the challenges facing the tourism sector in the city, and help create solutions which can lead into solving the existing challenges.  

For those potential entrepreneurs who already have a concrete business idea, the BSIS project has organised bootcamps for Business Start-ups. These bootcamps consist of a 2-day training to help them transform their ideas into entrepreneurial start-ups. During the bootcamps the participants did market research, learned how to pitch their idea and how to develop their business plan.  

More information on the upcoming events of BSIS can be found on the project website: http://bsis.ps/events/ and the facebook page: www.facebook.com/BSISpal/