Although the luxury developments and ASEZA are providing limited funding through their corporate social responsibility promises, every aid worker I spoke to said it was not nearly enough to offer sufficient basic services or vocational skills to the local population.

Nonetheless, they remain one of the only sources of funds for charities and nonprofits in the south.

The task of economically developing the rest of Aqaba and its surrounding towns is then assigned to chronically under-resources NGOs. All the while, the metropole near them orients itself completely around luxury tourism.

In Aqaba, I met with Salam, an aid worker who has lived and worked in the city for over a decade.

She said that remote areas in southern Jordan have formed “poverty pockets,” where a stagnant economy and physical isolation have left entire towns in need of constant interventions from NGOs.

This job is made even more challenging because NGOs and local governments rarely communicate with each other to coordinate projects, according to two sources in Aqaba's NGO scene. One worker even explained NGOs will often keep information about their respective projects secret from other organizations.

“There is no cooperation between people working in Aqaba,” which leads to multiple NGOs and charities performing redundant tasks and services, Salam said.

“It’s very difficult to work in development here,” she added.

Further to the north, in the isolated towns between Amman and Aqaba that don’t receive limited funding from luxury developments or entities like ASEZA, the challenge to economically integrate them is nearly impossible.

Strained local organizations are stuck in a losing battle trying to compete with the illicit drug trade as the primary vehicle of economic welfare.

Nowhere is this struggle more evident than in the remote town of Bader*.

Located on the backroads of Jordan, Bader is a poor village of a few hundred people. It’s firmly wedged into one of country’s many poverty pockets.

“We were completely shocked to realize that the kitchen was just three bricks."

The Beduin villagers of Bader were once nomads, but the government forcibly settled them into the town and quickly built houses for them as part of a nation-wide program to modernize Jordan.

Despite this, villagers still rely on more traditional style tents to be primary space for social life.

In this barren town, like many others in the region, men only have a few options to gain employment: sheep herding, joining the army, or drug smuggling.

A fair number chose drug smuggling, judging by the BMWs and Mercedes parked outside otherwise squalid, unfinished houses. A woman from the village even tried to speak out against the pervasive drug smuggling that was happening around her, but her family locked her in their house in an attempt to silence her protests, according to a source familiar with the incident.

To try and jumpstart the town’s motionless economy, two aid workers, Noor and Yasmine, attempted to establish a communal kitchen there in collaboration with a local council, which had recently received a 5,000 JD grant from USAID.

In the absence of any real economic life in the town, the kitchen was many local women’s best bet for a more prosperous life. The plan was to train women for the kitchen, operate it and then sell the goods created to other cities.

There was no extra money for monitoring and evaluation, follow-ups or consultants to make sure the kitchen would be built to last, so the two aid workers I spoke to joined the project as voluntary consultants.



“What was conveyed to us what was they already had the kitchen and everything was set up and now they just need[ed] training,” Noor told me.

“We were completely shocked to realize that the kitchen was just three bricks,” stuck in the ground. “It was completely dysfunctional, it was not even a building yet,” she said.

Noor added that throughout the project, there was a lack of guidance from USAID and the local government council, which both seemed utterly disconnected from the realities of Bader.

Soon after, USAID abruptly halted parts of its operations in Jordan, leaving towns like Bader with one less lifeline to try and integrate itself into an organic, legal economy.

“We realized that there was absolutely nobody in charge of this project,” Yasmine said. Despite a local government full of engineers capable of overseeing the technical aspects of the kitchen’s construction and maintenance, “nobody got shit done.”

Both volunteers said the representatives from USAID seemed more intent on ticking the boxes their donors want to be ticked rather than genuinely providing a vehicle for economic stability to the people of Bader.

“USAID just throws money into the hands of these people, and they don’t follow-up. They shouldn’t come in with just money, they should come in with technical help,” Noor said.

Yasmine agreed, quickly adding: “we felt it was really unfair that in some database somewhere, it would be documented that this village had received a grant, where in fact no one really followed up with where the money went.”

The volunteers decided to take it upon themselves to build the kitchen directly in collaboration with a local community leader rather than going through USAID or the local governmental chamber. Finding that the original economic plan to import food from across the country into the village was also nonsensical, they scrapped it and redrafted one that fit within the constraints of Bader’s limited and isolated position.

A makeshift kitchen was built, and training sessions began to teach women how to operate it.

But the tiny trickle of money, plus a confluence of poor management from USAID and the local government ultimately sabotaged the effort. Facing mounting technical issues, the kitchen was forced to close.

Soon after, USAID abruptly halted a part of its operation in Jordan helping to build small businesses, leaving towns like Bader with one less lifeline to try and integrate itself into an organic, legal economy. The community leaders in Bader are now seeking alternate sources of funding to re-open the kitchen.

Building a single kitchen for women in a stagnant town proved to be less feasible than building a new luxury city in the desert for a few jet setters.

Structurally, NGOs face a comparative disadvantage to local governments or powerful corporations. While the latter entities can construct infrastructure, create businesses and provide incentives to attract investment, effectively building an entire community’s economy from scratch, NGOs can merely fund individual projects, which rely on pre-existing development to succeed and neglect core issues overlooked by donors.

Other central factors like minimum wage and guarantees of workplace safety, which both influence women’s employment, are implemented by the government; not NGOs.



An Alienated People, a Hollow Economy

Demonstrators amass near Jordan’s Fourth Circle, protesting against austerity measures (AFP/FILE)

The economic situation in Jordan, for most, has worsened over the last decade.

Unemployment is slowly rising, and while the overall rate stands at 18.5 percent, youth unemployment is a much starker 40 percent. Only about 14 percent of women are employed. Wages have remained stagnant while the cost of living increases due to government-imposed austerity measures, which have dramatically raised the price of fuel, bread and gas.

Protests have consistently broken out against the cutbacks, which drawn hundreds and sometimes thousands of disenchanted working and middle class Jordanians into the streets.

The country’s debt, which is equivalent to 94 percent of its GDP, has become a national priority, and the government has begun squeezing the public sector. In turn, thousands are being driven into poverty. In 2014, the last time poverty was officially measured, the World Bank found that a third of the population lived below the poverty line for at least one quarter of the year.

International donors funding Jordan’s development and services for refugees are slowly leaving the country and refocusing their attention towards other crises. At the same time, Gulf countries are withholding multi-billion dollar aid loans for political reasons.

Many of these issues are amplified in the relatively poor, isolated towns of Jordan’s south.

“There are common issues and challenges facing the south like unemployment, poverty, social injustice, drugs, infrastructure, and education,” Osama Muhsen, a senior program officer with Hayat Center, an independent government watchdog told me.

“This marginalization came due to lack of proper planning by the governorate at the national level and centralizing all the resources in the capital,” he said, adding that when individuals from the south reach positions of power, they tend to stay in Amman rather than advocating for their southern communities’ local interests.

As a result, few public voices speak on the south’s behalf.

“Gaps in the education and employment nexus push young people towards extremists movements or to resort to drugs and crime."

This has prompted some southern youth to take matters into their own hands. In April 2019, 50 young men from the southern town of Ma’an walked 200 km to Amman to protest the unemployment and harsh conditions facing them and their communities.

After 13 days of sleep-ins outside the Royal Court, the government vowed to provide thousands of new jobs, but later back-tracked from the promise.

To cope with the mounting deprivation, an increasing number of Jordanians are turning to drugs.



Anwar al-Tarawneh, director of Jordan’s Anti-Narcotics Department, reported a 32 percent increase in drug addiction, possession and smuggling cases since 2017, which is on top of steady increases from 2009-2017.

So far, the AND has responded by implementing harsher penalties, which further alienate marginalized individuals.

This economic and social exclusion could have grave political consequences as they drive some towards political and religious radicalization, Barik Mhadeen, a human security expert with the WANA Institute in Amman explained.

“In Karak,” a southern region in Jordan, “gaps in the education and employment nexus push young people towards extremists movements or to resort to drugs and crime,” he said, citing a Feb 2019 study where WANA researchers interviewed 91 individuals from Karak on their political attitudes and grievances.

Interviewees for the study expressed that punitive measures from the state, “in tandem with rampant unemployment and a lack of social justice,” reinforce hostility against the government and push individuals toward extremism.

Mhadeen added that drug abuse represents, “one option young people could resort to, radicalization being another,” which for him underscores, “the need to address the structural issues which enhance different ‘destructive’ choices, radicalization included.”

There may even be a direct link to drug abuse and radicalization.

Rik Coolsaet, a professor at Ghent University and senior fellow at the Belgium-based Egmont Institute, told me, “the idea that you can redeem from 'past sins, ‘such as womanizing, alcohol, drug use and other crimes, by joining the jihadi scene has proven to be a powerful recruiting tool.”

Over 3,000 of ISIS’ fighters hailed from Jordan. According to one study, there were 315 fighters joining ISIS per 1 million people; giving Jordan, by far, the highest recruitment rate in the world.

Collectively, these issues threaten to destabilize Jordan, but inside the haven of compounds like Ayla, they simply aren’t visible.

The hard choices individuals face there is which pool to sunbathe by.

As these luxury developments grow in size, and more pop up around the city, they will further squeeze Aqaba’s economy to work exclusively for them, even if none of the wealth trickles down to the local population.

Inadvertently this process is already changing the city’s facade to make it more friendly to tourists.

The main roundabout in the city’s downtown is officially called the Great Arab Revolt Circle. It is named so because at the midway point of the Arab Revolt in 1917, local tribal forces advised by British army officer T.E. Lawrence took the strategic port city from the Ottoman Empire in a surprise attack. The raid allowed the British army to directly supply the anti-Ottoman insurrection from the sea. It also proved to be a key moment in the war, and the city has since celebrated its role in freeing Jordan from far-away rulers.

But if you actually call this roundabout the ‘Great Arab Revolt Circle,” like I did with locals in Aqaba, you’ll get a chuckle, and they’ll correct you.

“We call it Mack Circle,” they’ll say, “after the McDonald's nearby.”

*The original town's name has been changed to protect the community leaders. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Al Bawaba News.

