The Near East Foundation, a US international NGO, builds and supports civil society organizations in African and Middle Eastern communities experiencing deep poverty, along with conflict, migration and climate change. NEF's 100-plus field staff mobilize these "communities in peril" to find homegrown solutions in agriculture, education, health care and job creation. On an annual budget of approximately $7 million, NEF maintains offices and programs in Palestine, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Mali and Sudan. NEF's New York staff of six professionals supports these activities with administration, development and program management.

• NEF built a clinic and trained a local health committee to provide the only health care to 30,000 internally displaced Sudanese resettled outside of Khartoum, where NEF also helps with pre-school, primary and women's literacy education.
• NEF operates a pilot desert agricultural extension project jointly with farmers from three villages near Lake Nasser where the Egyptian government has resettled 60,000 people, and plans to relocate many more, from the Nile Delta.
• NEF activated parent-teacher councils in two dozen villages in the High Atlas Mountains, resulting in 100% of girls going to school when and average 10% did three years ago, a model NEF now is introducing throughout southern Morocco.
• NEF introduced irrigated rice farming and women-run village gardens and led efforts to restore water and plant life to marshes and lakes and protect and manage date and eucalyptus groves in dozens of villages in Mali's inland Niger River delta.

NEF's History

         The Near East Foundation began in 1915 when Henry Morgenthau, then US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, altered Cleveland H. Dodge and other Americans familiar with the Near East about the crisis facing Armenians and other minorities. What began as the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief raised funds throughout the United States and established hospitals, orphanages, schools and work facilities throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and into Russia to provide relief and resettlement for tens of millions of refugees and displaced people.

• In the aftermath of World War I, it became the primary US relief agency in the region and later the model for President Truman's Four-Point Program.
• From 1915 to 1930, it raised $110 million ($1.25 billion in today's dollars).
• When Congress granted a charter to the organization in 1919, its directors included William Howard Taft, Charles Evans Hughes and Elihu Root.
• When the organization was renamed the Near East Foundation in 1930, its directors included Franklin D. Roosevelt and Allen Dulles.