Basma Kitchen addresses the limited economic and market opportunities faced by underprivileged women who possess strong home-based food production skills but struggle to access broader markets, expand their customer base, and transform their skills into sources of income. The initiative empowers these women by integrating them into home-based food production and connecting their products to wider markets, while also embedding a social model that reinvests net profits into supporting vulnerable families and community initiatives. Through this approach, it creates dignified income opportunities for marginalized women, strengthens local food entrepreneurship, and promotes community solidarity by channeling economic value back into community well-being.
Tamer Younis
Founder
2026 Fellow - Nablus
Tamer spent years running a university library and giving his spare time to community volunteer work — and it was in that work, not in any business plan, that Basma Kitchen began. He kept meeting women who didn't want charity; they wanted a chance. One woman's words stayed with him: "I don't want help. I want an opportunity to live with dignity." A former library director with a background in culinary work and deep community roots, Tamer saw that the gap wasn't skill — Palestinian women had that in abundance — it was market access. Basma Kitchen is his answer: not a welfare project, but a platform that treats women's talent as the asset it already is.
