MASHAV, the Hebrew acronym for the Center for International Cooperation, was established as a division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. What started as a modest program focused on grassroots-level human capacity building at a time when Israel itself was still very much a developing country, has blossomed into an extensive program of cooperation throughout the developing world with the aim of promoting sustainable development and social equity.
Since 1958, MASHAV – MASHAV – Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation of the Foreign Ministry of Israel has trained almost 200,000 course participants from approximately 140 countries in Israel and abroad and has developed dozens of demonstration projects worldwide in fields of Israeli expertise.
Over the years, MASHAV has consistently made its priority the aims of poverty alleviation, provision of food security, empowerment of women and upgrade of basic health and education services, putting Israel's own creative solutions at the disposal of the developing world. The formalization of these priorities in the Millennium Development Goals has only caused us to redouble our longstanding efforts to put Israeli solutions at the service of the developing world in order to further these aims.