Randa is the director of the Union of Cooperative Associations for Saving and Credit (UCASC) in Palestine. She has 32 years of experience; contributed to the foundation of the Savings and Credit Groups initiative in Palestine, and focused in particularly on Women Empowerment, Social Economy, and Microcredit within the Saving and Credit cooperatives. During her professional experience, she received training in different topics and fields such as Loan and Delinquency management, Islamic finance and insurance, Social Performance Feasibility Studies, Team Building &Communication Skills, Advanced Operational & Financial Analysis), she has a two years ToT Certification Program, Microfinance (Jordan), Design and Management of Microfinance Programs, Gender. Randa is a member of the general assembly of NGOs, PARC, ACAD, and Reef finance, board Member of the Palestinian Agricultural credit institution “PACI” and chairwomen of Rural Wo men’s Development Society RWDS
UCASC is the legal umbrella for Saving and Credit cooperatives CASCs. As of 31/12/2019, 12 Saving and Credit cooperatives are under the cooperative, one CASC had been registries on each governorate of West Bank and one on the national level are members of UCASC, in which 10 of the cooperative are women-only, the other two are mixed (Hebron and Public Sector employee’s cooperative). With an active membership of 5,278 widespread through 224 groups /village, with a member’s balance amount of $4,540,211 of savings and shares, which represent the major component of the loan portfolio. The cumulative number of disbursed loans is 16,302, with the value of 43,780,217 USD, for the benefit of 7,340 borrowers, 6,717 are women. These women are categorized as poor since the majority of them hold no financial assets and are fully dependent on men for their living and showing good potential to be self-dependent.
