BMU | Events

Explore the Barrier Monitoring Unit (BMU)’s recent and upcoming events.

Briefings

Recently there has been an increased demand for the BMU to give briefings on the Barrier. Teams of diplomatic staff, various government representatives, and journalists accompany the BMU on tours, experiencing the Barrier's impacts firsthand.

ACPP workshop

From 30 January to 3 February 2012, the second Academic Co-operation Palestine Project (ACPP) workshop brought our partners to the West Bank. The workshop discussed the Postgraduate Certificate in Research and Advocacy (PCRA) project proposal and the project’s future funding approaches.

The platform for the ACPP connects international and Palestinian academic and research institutions to facilitate co-operation activities like trainings, joint research projects and partnership networking. The first workshop in the occupied Palestinian territory took place in April 2010 and discussed the objectives, methodologies and activities of the ACPP. Its main objective was to build the “capacity of Palestinian researchers and their institutions in developing the collection and analysis of territorial, spatial and human data” through the establishment of the PCRA.

The Postgraduate Certificate in Research and Advocacy will be the first postgraduate certificate program of its kind in the occupied Palestinian territory.

TCT training manual

The Thematic Cartography Training (TCT) partners’ joint manual will be published in Spring 2012. This manual will be distributed to educational institutions and libraries throughout the occupied Palestinian territory, and will be available online.

The BMU, Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ), the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and École Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne developed the self-teaching manual for cartography for anyone interested in learning statistical mapping. The manual details processes in open-source map-making programs and allows students to express themed research based on geography in a visual manner. The manual covers all topics needed for these programs and even contains a chapter on the history of map-making in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Joint list of communities directly-affected by the Barrier

Partnered with PCBS, the BMU is finalising a joint list of communities that are directly affected by the Barrier. This list will be used as the basis for future monitoring projects assessing various impacts within these communities.

This will be the first comprehensive list produced by any institution conducting research related to the Barrier. Previously, the lack of such a comprehensive list of affected communities made it difficult to undertake effective and systematic Barrier monitoring, as researchers did not have a unified research framework. With the completion of this list, a gap will be filled and information related to the Barrier will be easier to produce, share, compare and analyse. This will greatly enhance advocacy efforts related to the Barrier.

Joint BMU-ARIJ event: presentation of preliminary findings

On 7 June 2012, on the occasion of World Environment Day, the BMU and ARIJ organised a shared event to present the preliminary findings of their joint study. The event was hosted at ARIJ's offices in Bethlehem, and was attended by Felipe Sanchez, West Bank director of UNRWA operations and the Palestinian Authority's Minister of the Environment Dr. Yousef Abu-Safieh.