Hello and welcome to World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
I'm Sam Fenwick. Today we're looking at the immense challenges facing Gaza.
With the cost of rebuilding estimated to reach as high as US $80 billion, the task ahead is monumental.
Beyond the reconstruction of buildings, we'll explore the critical aspect of job creation, essential for providing livelihoods to a population that has faced significant economic hardship.
We'll hear from experts, policymakers and those on the ground to understand the complex journey of rebuilding Gaza and the practical steps being taken to support its recovery.
After 15 months of bitter conflict, on the Gaza Strip, a ceasefire has been agreed which promises to end an end to the fighting and will allow the access of food and other desperately needed humanitarian aid.
The deal needs to be voted through by the Israeli cabinet.
Since the Israel defence forces launched their ground operation in Gaza in 2023 in response to Hamas's terror attack of October 7th, more than 46 ,000 Palestinians have reported to have been killed, including 17 ,500 children.
Fadwa al -Qawakas left Gaza after her father, mother, brother and older sister were killed.
She's now living in Oman with her husband and daughter.
Before the war, we lived a beautiful wife with my family.
My father, he worked in trade and my sister Maram, she is a bride.
But war, she took everything away.
She is lost in her home, her husband.
She has nothing left.
So, during this war, you have lost virtually your entire family, haven't you?
You lost your father, your mother, your brother, your older sister.
Yes. Yes, my old sister, Nirmim.
She left behind Carmen and Elia.
And her husband, Carmen and Elia, little young, three years and four years.
Yes. Every day, I ask Karimi and Elia about their mother.
Where mom? Where mom?
The war finished. Where mom?
You're talking to us from Oman.
How did you get out of Gaza?
They were all my family killed.
My sister was, my mum, the only survivor.
When I received the news of their martyrdom, it was difficult, yes.
I left the country, and I left Gaza and paid a large sum of money, about $500 a person.
And myself, and my daughter, and my brother, and my husband, it was hard for me to leave Gaza without my sister, Mara, because she still is in the South, Gaza, and me and I and my father, sorry, my brother till in South Gaza.
Before the war started, you had an interior design business.
Yes, I'm Artiquette Engineering.
I have an office. I provide a service interior design and exterior and landscaping and planning to residential, commercial building and landscaping.
What's happened to your business?
I lost my business, I lost my office, I lost my data in my lab and workstation.
Everything's just gone, everything's just destroyed.
Yeah, everything destroyed.
Do you think you'll be able to start it again?
Yes, I start again in zero.
i start again because um because because life must go on because my daughter because my sister do you think you would one day return to gaza yes i'm returning to gaza i'm returning to gaza to open across across rafah i return to gaza do you think it's important to return to gaza to try and, you know,
rebuild the economy again, to rebuild your homes.
Yes, this is our duty.
I will not abandon Gaza.
No, no, I will not.
Badwa also told me that she has mixed feelings about the ceasefire.
She says that she doesn't know how to express the sadness that she feels inside.
Last summer, eight months into the conflict, the International Labour Organization reported that unemployment rate in the Gaza Strip reached a staggering 80%.
In the West Bank, which has also been severely impacted by the crisis, unemployment has soared to 32%.
Before the recent conflict, the tech sector in Palestine, particularly in Gaza, was a significant employer.
It's estimated it employed between 5 % to 10 % of the working population in Gaza.
Since 2011, Alan Al Qadi has been working for the charity Mercy Corps in Gaza, delivering IT training.
He joins us now from Jerusalem.
Alan, thanks for joining us.
Give us an idea of the impact the conflict has had on people's ability to work both in Gaza and the West Bank.
Yeah, thank you very much.
Well, first of all, the economy in Gaza and the West Bank has always been challenged because of the severe restrictions of movement.
And online work has been a way to overcome these challenges.
But even if we think on the online sector, even that has been severely impacted by the war.
And in Gaza, you only have to look at the pictures on the news for the last 15 months.
You know, the destruction of homes and infrastructure, shortages of food, living needs and so on.
And, of course, tens of thousands have been killed and injured.
And many of those people were part of the online tech community and they were previously earning incomes from Gaza by servicing customers globally online.
At 1 .9 million people have been displaced, according to the UN.
Are those people able to continue working and maybe trying to support the Gazan economy whilst at the same time working away from Gaza?
Yes, so the ones within Gaza, their focus primarily has been trying to stay alive.
But there's also been a brain drain of many of the skilled workers who've managed to escape from Gaza into Egypt, you know, prior to the border being closed.
So many of those have moved over to Egypt and so forth.
And you had to move your operations out of Gaza as well.
You were unable to work there.
You were working there since 2011.
Yeah, well, we've had a big operation there.
We had three big co -working spaces and training centres, very large spread around Gaza.
Those have all been destroyed.
And me personally, I can't get back in now.
I haven't been in there since this, obviously the war started.
But many of the people, our community there, both our staff and the tech community, which are tens of thousands of them and very skilled, have continued to try and find work despite the...
And you had to move your operations out of Gaza as well.
You were unable to work there.
You were working there since 2011.
yeah well we've had a big operation there we had three big co -working spaces and training centers very large spread around gaza those have all been destroyed and me personally i can't get back in now i haven't been in there since this obviously the the war started but many of the uh people our community
there both our our staff and the tech community which are tens of thousands of them and very skilled, have continued to try and find work despite the terrible situation there.
What do you think is needed then in a post -conflict Gaza to try and support employment?
Well, clearly the most important thing, the priority is humanitarian aid and reconstruction.
That's the priority.
But from an employment perspective, we strongly believe that the tech sector is even more relevant than it was before October 23.
And looking forward, the tech sector is going to be really the fastest to revive.
If you think of sectors such as agriculture or manufacturing, they're going to require considerable time and investment to rebuild.
whereas the existing tens of thousands of tech workers are there all they really need is a workspace with internet electricity and a laptop and they're on they're up and running again and generating income but getting electricity and and you know kind of internet connection that's going to be very difficult
isn't it well what's so amazing even through the last 15 months of this we know from our community there they've been creating co -working spaces in large tents fitting them out with desks and so forth.
They're powering them with solar panels, diesel generators, and we can get internet there.
We can get internet connections.
So many, many people are finding ways to still work.
We heard from Fadwa, she used to run a interior design business.
How difficult do you think it will be for her when she returns, she said that she wants to, to start a business like that again?
it's just going to be extremely challenging.
But I'm really impressed by the people who still want to go back or the ones who've remained there.
Like I said, infrastructure.
Early last year, a joint report by the World Bank and the United Nations estimated the cost of damage to critical infrastructure to be around $8 .5 billion.
But months have passed since then, and other experts have suggested that the actual cost could be closer to $80 billion.
Here's Professor Yara Asi from the Arab Center in Washington.
We know that more than 90 % of homes have been destroyed.
Every university, most schools have been damaged or destroyed.
Almost no hospital has been spared from destruction.
All the arable land where they were able to grow crops has been destroyed.
Primarily, almost all livestock has been killed or slaughtered.
So this is a tens of billions.
You know, there was an estimate in the early fall that it would be about 80 billion.
undoubtedly more now rebuilding a society from the ground up not just homes but everything required for a society mosques and schools and hospitals and everything else and roads even akim steimer is the head of the united nations development program and we heard from him from the un headquarters in new
york will take years to rebuild and that early recovery phase that would follow an initial response and then a reconstruction phase will indeed be rolled out over a number of years.
I think the international community and we in the United Nations Development Programme as part of the UN system have been very much focused on preparing the pathways here together with the Palestinian Authority and the international donor community.
And that's the point at which we are.
So you actually have a plan in place, you said you have been working on this in the last, I suppose, 15 months to see what could be rebuilt.
Well, first of all, we have been monitoring from a socioeconomic perspective what the impact of the conflict is, the level of destruction.
And there will be another report that will be issued in the very near future between the World Bank, the United Nations and the European Union on the physical destruction, first of all, of infrastructure.
As you heard just now, we have been trying to assess the degree to which early recovery activities would enable people to, first of all, be able to survive.
We need to bring in, for instance, solar power, water treatment plants.
There is no clean drinking water anymore, sanitation, the removal of solid waste, which is creating major health hazards.
These kinds of activities have been mapped out and can be undertaken and scaled up very quickly.
The next step would then be to prioritize what kind of infrastructure.
And let me just give you one more number.
We estimate right now that there are 40 million tons of rubble.
Just the ability to remove that rubble, including unexploded ordnance, is another illustration of the scale of effort we need in order to begin to be able to talk about reconstruction.
Akin Steimer there, the head of the United Nations Development Programme, was talking to my colleague Roger Hearing.
Sultan Barakat is a professor in Conflict and Humanitarian Studies at Hamidbil Khalifa University.
He's also advised the organisations like the UN, the World Bank and the EU on post -conflict recovery.
Sultan, Thank you for joining us on the programme today, joining us from Doha.
Thank you. One wonders where one begins trying to rebuild Gaza.
We heard there from Mr Steiner just talking about how much rubble there is to remove before you even start any kind of rebuilding.
When you've worked on projects similar to this in the past, where have you advised organisations to begin?
well I think the most important is to place the people of Gaza at the center of the equation of reconstruction no amount of preparation by the UN or any other agency will be a good substitute for the direct engagement and participation and I would dare to say the leadership of the local population in the reconstruction itself
they need to be able to use the process of rebuilding to help them readjust socially and psychologically and to help each other to come out of what has been an incredible trauma.
Aside from all the losses that your program listed earlier, there has been really deep destruction of the social fabric of the families within Gaza.
I suppose there's a little difficulty there though, that at the moment there is sort of no functioning government, that there's no leadership so does that need to be organized first before you can start kind of physical shovels in the ground?
It is but I think we need to shift the discussion away from the security of Israel which dominates the rebuilding of Gaza at the moment.
Everybody is thinking how can we allow the people of Gaza to rebuild but within the confinement of Israeli security parameter.
Now, we need to shift that to the welfare and the advancement of the Palestinian people themselves.
And I was very pleased to hear on your program earlier discussion around technology and online connections to the rest of the world and so on, because they do need to come up with much more innovative models to help people to, A, return and, B, start to engage in the rebuilding.
If you allow me just to say, for example, what have we learned from the previous attempts to rebuilding Gaza?
What were the main obstacles?
The first and most important obstacle has been, as I said, this alienation of the local population.
Everybody seems to think they know what Gaza requires.
And they're all, without exception, working with Israel first on their mind, Israel's security.
Second, because of the confinement and because of the siege of Gaza itself, it is impossible to bring in any building material into the strip, including a lot of very important components of construction, of making cement, et cetera, et cetera.
All of this has got to be approved by the Israelis to be allowed in.
And year after year, ever since 2007, there's been many wars, many attempts to reconstruct within Gaza.
All of them have been affected and delayed by this kind of siege, by the siege on the Gaza itself.
So the International Committee needs to ensure that there is adequate material and it is allowed in.
There is no point of planning for reconstruction and saying the Gaza people have got to go back to indigenous materials.
This is a lot of the talk nowadays about them going back to building from mud in order to be able to do early recovery.
We need to put political pressure on Israel to allow the reconstruction to take place as it should be and at the speed it should happen.
Just one final question.
The resilience of people.
We heard from Fadwa earlier, she's lost virtually all of her family, but she's still wanting to go back to Gaza to help build it and build its economy again.
I mean, that's inspiring, isn't it?
It is inspiring, but they have no other choice.
I mean, a lot of these Gaza people are trapped in that confined space.
They need to return.
The majority of them are already refugees from the 1948 war, 1967 war.
So they have come to Gaza on principle on a temporary basis.
They fear that if they do not return to their original place of displacement, they will never go to their original homes.
So for them, a return, they're returning to refugee camps.
If you see the majority of the housing stock we're talking about is a very, very low quality.
that the footprint is a tent and has been building incrementally and been developing incrementally for the last 40, 50, 60 years with very little infrastructure, very little spaces in between them, bad health situation and so on.
So they have no option but to return.
And it is admirable that they have the spirit still to return, but they are really, because they feel injustice and they must do it.
And then there is a lot of social support networks that exist that is not obvious to us at the first glance.
For example, the remittances that is coming from outside to the Gaza people.
These are very important to help them remain afloat.
But again, they require Israel to allow the cash in.
Another very important component is the United Nations Work and Relief Agency, ONUROA.
Now, by the end of the month, Israel is going to dismantle the whole project.
And if Onurwa is not there, there is no other agency or other mechanism capable of distributing humanitarian aid and or delivering education, health across the Gaza Strip.
So we need to be able to propose ideas, but also push politically for them to be materialized in the right way.
Thank you very much.
Sultan Barakat there, Professor of Conflict and Humanitarian Studies at the Khalifa University, joining us from Doha.
Now, on to a couple of other stories now.
The Philippines is taking steps to lower the price of rice, which the Agriculture Minister has called extraordinary.
Its grains agency may now sell its buffer stocks of rice in an effort to lower prices, with the higher prices leading to inflation beyond the central bank's targets in 2022 and 2023.
At one point, the president capped rice prices, with the grain making up to about a tenth of the South East Asian nation's consumer basket.
The food chain today on the BBC World Service is all about rice.
And Ruth Alexander, the presenter of the programme, has been speaking to, among others, Yvonne Pinto, who is Director -General of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.
There is some declining consumption patterns in some countries, for example, South Korea and Japan.
But in Africa, consumption is rising.
So the world needs more rice.
The world needs more rice but if you anticipate that the climate is changing globally and we are subject to climate shocks, the production systems are under attack and so not only does the rice need to be more resilient but we need to maintain the production and indeed probably increase it as the population growth
continues. Today a key focus is how to produce rice that can adapt to a changing climate.
High rainfall, salinity, submergence, the varieties that are being desired are those that carry traits that enable this resilience.
Drought -tolerant varieties that are more resilient to a little less rainfall in the context of climate change and might also be able to perform when the temperature is higher.
In the very wet context, We've used our genetics to screen for varieties using conventional breeding programmes to extend submergence underwater from 14 days to 21 days.
So these varieties can persist under flooded conditions for long enough for the floods to recede and it doesn't affect their yield.
Yvonne Pinto there talking to Ruth Alexander.
Now, in a few days, Donald Trump will assume office as America's president for a second term.
His return to the White House could have mixed implications for Africa.
Our reporter Michael Koloki has been looking at the potential impact of the Trump presidency on businesses across the continent.
It's quite busy out here on the streets of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
I'm standing in a neighborhood of the city known to host a number of diplomatic missions.
As I look into the distance, I can see a large imposing building and that is the US Embassy here in Nairobi.
Kenya and many other African countries have had a longstanding relationship with the United States.
He did initiate the program Prosper Africa, which in my view has done well.
In the second year of his first term, Trump launched the Prosper Africa initiative aimed at advancing trade and commercial ties between the US and the African continent.
Abraham Mudogo, a Kenyan economist and CEO of Miradi Capital, feels that Prosper Africa has had positive benefits and that Trump is likely to keep it in place in his second term.
So I think what he would probably do is amplify its present activity to achieve whatever he had intended to achieve in the first term and enhance it during his second term.
Churchill Ogotu, another Kenyan economist, also agrees.
Yes, so around Prosper Africa, there have been deals transacted of around $120 billion over the last five years, and which is remarkable in my view, and basically these deals cut across a number of sectors of African economies.
During Donald Trump's campaign in the lead -up to the 2024 U .S.
elections, he constantly emphasised his America First policy, which some economists have implied to mean that he will focus on building America as his priority.
What do regular business people on the continent feel about Trump's possible impact on business in Africa?
I spoke to some of them at their shops in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
My name is John Mwangi, I'm a homeer.
I'm a small -scale trader.
Now I see that you are here selling clothes.
Are any of your clothes imported?
Yes, I usually sell second -hand clothes, so we rely on importation.
Would some of that be from the United States?
Yeah, mostly UK and US, we usually target that market.
So do you think Trump's presidency might have a direct impact on your business itself because you're importing items directly from the United States?
Yes, I think so because it will affect the taxation, those things, and it will go back to us as traders.
My name is Wamboyumasharia.
As Trump is sworn in as president in a few days, what are your hopes as a business person here who imports from the United States?
I only hope for the best.
At least he makes things easier for us.
The Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, commonly referred to as AGOA, is a preferential trade program that allows eligible countries in sub -Saharan Africa to export certain products to the United States tariff free.
AGOA is set to expire in 2025.
Will Trump's administration renew AGOA or decide to do away with it?
Grace Asante is an economics professor at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana.
Whether he likes it or not, Africa is a key in their development.
I don't think that he will just end the program.
But whatever it is, they are also benefiting from it.
It is not a matter of only Africa benefiting.
And if he does so, you know, the other countries are also trying to get hooked to Africa.
If you study the background of their relation with China, it's because China has been so aggressive.
That was Michael Kolochi reporting for us, bringing us to the end of World Business Report for today.
Thank you very much for listening.
