Funding delays opening of women's library in north

It's been nearly four months since the US-based Counterpart NGO agreed to donate six lorry containers it had used to bring emergency humanitarian aid into Iraq last year to the Kurdistan Women's Union (KWU) for conversion into a women's library. With a budget of US $115,000 agreed on in April after consultation with the now disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), KWU set to work preparing a site for the library by the side of the main road running through Hai Askari, an impoverished district of the northern Iraqi city of Arbil. It was a sensible enough place for Arbil's first women's library. The women of Hai Askari, many of them members of farming families displaced from around Kirkuk, Mahmour and Dibaga, also in the north, are mostly jobless, with few opportunities to leave their homes. "We're keen to offer a chance to the women of this area to improve their education and their general awareness," KWU's public relations officer, Sabriya Babekir Ahmed, told IRIN. "We want to act as a counterweight to the view that they should stay within their own four walls." Borrowing from the library, she added, would be free. "Users will only be required to give their addresses, so that we can chase them up if they fail to return books," she explained. A project manager for Counterpart, Mahmood Hassan pointed out that this was not the only public library in Arbil. "The others are all out of bounds to more traditional families, unwilling to send their wives and daughters to places where they could meet men," he said. He added that plans for the library included space for a small cafe and a conference room, both providing an opportunity for women to meet others. Ahmed described work on the library as being "in the decoration phase". "We have spent $65,000 so far," said Ahmed, whose organisation agreed to fund construction costs back in April. "Now funds from our donors, the Kurdistan Regional Government, have dried up." She hoped that international aid organisations would step in to finance the rest of the project. Hassan suspects Counterpart may end up footing the bill. But he thinks that could take time. "This appears to be a bit of a fallow period for funding," he said. "We have a lot of projects pending, but so far no firm promises of financial backing. And I think that's true of a lot of NGOs in this region." Back at Counterpart's headquarters in the town of Ain Kawa, just north of Arbil, project manager Biner Aziz is undaunted by the slow progress on the Hai Askari library. "We have eight containers left over from the emergency work we did last year, and we're planning to convert some of them at least into local clinics in remote areas," he said.