MENA Opportunities

A new online ‘micro-giving’ platform for financing young Arab entrepreneurs has launched in Qatar to fund micro enterprises of the Arab world’s unemployed youth. Narwi.com was founded by two Doha-based organisations, Qatar Charity and Silatech, which aim to leverage the power of crowdfunding to help provide financing to young Arabs wishing to start their own very small enterprises. Silatech is a social initiative headquartered in Qatar, designed to promote entrepreneurship in the region, while Qatar Charity is an NGO, established in 1992 to support Qatari society and communities in need abroad. Dr Tarik M Yousef, CEO of Silatetch, said of Narwi: “It will allow visitors to the site to directly and securely contribute toward financing the young Arab entrepreneur of their choice in countries including Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia. “Funds on Narwi are given as revolving donations, so that when the entrepreneur repays the original loan, the donation moves on to sup...

Picture the perfect weekend: you leave work early on a Thursday as you have secured tickets for the Madinat Jumeirah theater performance of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, with a new cast list consisting of Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier. On Friday you take in an intimate jazz session with Bob Dylan in a bar along Sheikh Zayed Road and you round off the night with a retro concert with a jam-packed line-up of names including Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Elvis Presley, James Brown and Kurt Cobain. It all sounds like fantasy but it can all be (almost) possible with the latest advances in hologram 3D technology. No longer the domain of Star Trek fiction, the sophisticated projection devices currently available mean deceased superstars can be brought back to life for one more performance beyond the grave, or existing artists could play exclusive concerts without being physically present and appear simultaneously on stage in London, Abu Dhabi or Las Vegas. Joe Tabet...

Riham Mahafzah, a co-founder of Jordanian start-up Gallery Alshark, is proof of how Middle East entrepreneurs can tap into the Arab-American network of Silicon Valley trailblazers looking to help the next generation of business founders. In the past 18 months, she placed third in the MIT Enterprise Forum Arab Startup Competition in Doha; had a month’s intensive mentoring with TechWadi, a non-profit in San Francisco that builds bridges between Silicon Valley and the Arab world, and returned to Silicon Valley for a week-long visit as part of a group of 30 rising Middle East entrepreneurs. Now the businesswoman is in San Francisco participating in a four-month accelerator program run by 500 Startups. Although near the start of the program, Ms Mahafzah has already tweaked her business, which sells stock images online. She now believes her market extends beyond just the Middle East to eastern Europe, Turkey and Asia and has changed her company’s name from Gallery Alshark to Silk Road Ima...

According to American information technology research and advisory firm, Gartner, total Middle East IT and telecoms spend is set to grow 24 per cent from USD 195.6 billion last year to USD 243 billion by 2018, with device spending set to jump 30 per cent from USD 30 billion to USD 39 billion over the same five-year period. The surge in IT and device spending represents huge potential for increased automation opportunities in nearly all fields of industry, as businesses seek to leverage a rise in mobility, smart government, Big Data and the Internet of Things - the interconnection of embedded computing-like devices, systems and services across a variety of protocols, domains and applications that go beyond standard machine-to-machine communications (M2M). According to a recent report issued by Frost & Sullivan, half of all global businesses find M2M, mobile device management and mobile software applications to be highly-effective technologies. The number of international business...

Emirati entrepreneur Ahmed AlMentheri encountered the same problems that a lot of other young enterprise hopefuls mention - closed doors, and a lack of hard knowledge as to the process of converting an idea into a real business. His UAE-based company, Kaizen Blitz LLC (KB), is working with one product at present, an energy drink made in the U.S. named +RED. He’s currently employed in the oil and gas sector, and prior to launching KB did mostly “small business deals like selling plate numbers and classic cars.” As for the concept behind his new company’s corporate identity? AlMentheri explains that the Japanese name is “well-known in quality control,” and that their brand means “continuous improvement”. Improvement indeed, working with his co-founder, Walid Alkhaili, the duo wanted to get their idea off the ground, and went to Tejar Dubai for guidance after a slew of disappointments. “I came up with the idea when I was looking for a franchise to bring to the UAE, but with the demand...

Long outshone by start-up founders from places such as Silicon Valley, some entrepreneurs working in the UAE are now being recognized for their influence across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Next Tuesday in New York City, the former US president Bill Clinton is set to host the annual Hult Prize, which awards US$1 million to launch a business conceived by social entrepreneurs that best attempts to solve a global problem. But Mr Clinton will not be judging the finalists. That particular responsibility will be left up to a panel of just five judges, including Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who won a Nobel Peace prize for pioneering microfinance, Sanjay Gupta, an anchor for CNN, as well as Fadi Ghandour, the founder and vice chairman of the Jordan-based logistics company Aramex. Earlier this year, Mr Ghandour announced that he would be launching an investment fund to seed start-ups from MENA. He now splits his time between Jordan and the UAE, where last year...

The UAE has topped two of the three main categories of this year’s Forbes Middle East 200 Most Powerful Arab Women. Sheikha Lubna Al Qasimi, Minister for International Cooperation and Development, won top slot in the list of the most powerful women in government. A total of 26 women from the Emirates featured on the list of 200 drawn from government, family business and executive management. The UAE dominated the family business category with Raja Easa Al Gurg, managing director of UAE-based Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group securing first place. The category also includes Fatima Al Jaber, the chief operating officer of Al Jaber Group and Amna BinHendi, the chief executive of BinHendi Enterprises. It is also in family businesses that women are most likely to rise to prominence, with 43 per cent of all entrants, 85 in total, from family businesses across the region. Overall Egypt accounted for the highest number of entries at 29, followed by Saudi Arabia with 27 and the UAE with 26. Further i...

Witness the role of motivation in your everyday life: from the moment the alarm sounds to getting prepared on time for your daily office grind and pushing through a workout later that evening. Being focused on a goal and exercising your willpower to reach it is something that we do so frequently that it almost takes place subconsciously. Our lives are full of temptations that tax our motivation and resolve. Psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and science writer John Tierney, authors of the bestselling book 'Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Human Strength', believe that willpower is like a muscle. It is something that we can build up through the right sustenance and exercise, and it is also something that can get worn out. In other words: Willpower is limited. In today’s world, technology comes with the promise of greater efficiency and continuous connectivity yield to a lack of downtime. We are all caught up in trying to get as much done in as little time as possible with sh...

Nabil Habayeb’s office is a modest set-up. Occupying one corner of an executive floor in General Electric Co (GE)’s headquarters in Dubai Internet City, there’s a few framed family photos on bookshelves and his desk, a three-piece lounge on the other side of the room, a few coffee table books and even an Emirates Airline model plane, presumably in a nod to the two companies’ extensive links. Sitting with the president and CEO of the global manufacturing giant’s Middle East, North Africa and Turkey (MENAT) operations, a particular painting hanging above his head catches my eye. It’s a piece by Bahraini painter Raif Shehab, he says. “It was a gift from my employees when I celebrated 20 years with the company,” he adds, before casually dropping the fact that he is currently celebrating 32 years with GE. Indeed, while his office may be rather modest, his achievements at GE are anything but.

“There is an appetite for more risky investments, which shows sophistication and the longer-term approach of local investors,” said Abrar Ahmad, a partner at Travel Capitalist Ventures, to the audience of the Arabian Business StartUp Academy. The breakfast workshop organised in partnership with Mashreq Bank and entitled Book Keeping and Accounting: Preparing your Business for Funding and Growth, allowed attending investors, accountants and start-up owners to exchange opinions on the investment culture in the region. “Think of book-keeping and accounting as the 'behind the scenes' version of metrics,” Ahmad added during his presentation, offering important information about what investors look for in an investment proposition. “Just like you have hashtags and statistics for your sales and marketing, you have burn rate, cash flow statements, EBITDA, and similar for the accounting side of your business.” His wealth of hands-on experience on the matter stems from his investment ...

As an entrepreneur, you start building everything from scratch. This should also include creating a teamwork culture of high performance, personal development and continuous learning. Most of the people who join start-ups do so for the feeling of accomplishment that they’ve taken part in building a vision which has allowed them to express their own creativity and individuality along the way. Therefore, rather than trying to secure high performance of your staff with high salaries, which in most cases you’re not able to do from day one, a rule of thumb is: • Recognize and praise successful performance. • Address under-performance in a fair and equitable manner. If you’re a smart entrepreneur, you will hire staff whose performance successfully meets and sometimes exceeds your expectations. But if you are a very smart entrepreneur, you will create a community of motivated individuals whose teamwork results in an outstanding performance. To do that, at times you will have to face a staf...

Minister of Education Prince Khaled Al-Faisal attended the annual ceremony of the Saudi Injaz Entrepreneurs Program 2014 under the slogan “Prepare Saudi youth as leaders of tomorrow in the world of entrepreneurship” at the Jeddah Hilton. The ceremony was held to honor the best supervisors of the program, best business idea, best marketing plan, best product, best young entrepreneurs and best sponsor companies. He also visited the stalls of the Saudi entrepreneurs to encourage them to start small businesses. Prince Khaled Al-Faisal lauded the efforts of the Saudi Injaz Entrepreneurs Program and expressed his joy at the celebration marking the success of the Saudi youth in the labor market. “I am delighted to be with you tonight and hope this program will play the role of constructive bridges and cooperation between human capital, families, schools and the business sector with developing and fulfilling the ambitions of our youth,” he said. He added that the success of the program lay ...

Starting and growing a business with family members can be a great yet challenging experience. One can benefit from the close relationships and trust between family members, relying on them during hard times. But it can sometimes be difficult to preserve a harmonious relationship. This is something Farida El Agamy, general manager of the Dubai-based knowledge resource and networking hub for Arab family-owned business, Tharawat Family Business Forum, knows all too well. “That’s why the topic of family businesses is definitely a very interesting and complex one,” she says. “I’ve discovered it to be very honest. I didn’t know much about it, but I discovered my family business at the same time as I discovered the topic,” she adds as sits in her office in Dubai Media City. “In a region like the Arab world, where there is an increasingly important need for sustainable job creation and economic stability, family-owned businesses play a crucial role. “We are looking at Arab family businesse...

Entrepreneurship hub The Bedaya Center for Entrepreneurship and Career Development has held a training program to develop Qatar’s future oil and gas leaders. The eight-day program took place in Doha for 23 Qatari interns from Qatar Chemical Company (Q-Chem), helping them adapt to their new work environment and develop their life and business skills Hamad Al Kubaisi, board member of the Bedaya Center, said: “This is the second time we have cooperated with Q-Chem, as oil & gas is one of Qatar’s vital industrial sectors. “Our program helps to develop the skills of those who have recently entered the industry and prepares them to be the sector’s future leaders.” Q-Chem general manager, Michael Zeglin, added: “This is part of Q-Chem’s ongoing efforts to support our commitment of Total Quality Qatarisation.” The training was held at the Qatar Independent Technical School (QITS), and covered several key, youth-related areas such as career planning, handling staff personality difference...

Many art ventures over recent years have been established around the world to make the buying of art for collectors, first time or seasoned buyers easy. Most of these ventures are based in the USA or Europe and many recently have secured venture capital funding.  Now is the turn of the MENA region… welcome to artscoops.com, an online art platform. Artscoops.com was started by mother and daughter team Raya & May Mamarbachi after realizing that there was a gap in the market regionally with regards to promoting artists and making ‘art’ accessible to all online. After long brainstorming sessions ‘Artscoops’ was born. Artscoops.com works with both galleries and artists. Artworks are handpicked and consigned to the website for sale for a period of 6 months. Artscoops endeavors to introduce, promote, negotiate and conclude sales of artworks online. Artscoops is pleased to have created a partnership with Paddle8 and will be holding its first online auction between the 10th and 21s...

Iraq has the region's lowest internet penetration, yet enjoys a higher level of mobile subscriptions than Qatar, Lebanon, and Turkey, while Palestine and  Turkey have the highest percentage of 3G subscribers — ahead of better known 3G markets such as UAE and Kuwait. These are just some of the findings from a huge data-pack published last month by the global marketing and communications agency We Are Social. Harnessing data from a variety of sources including GSMA Intelligence, InternetLiveStats (both of which are home to some rather cool live counters) as well as the US Census Bureau, the slides offer deep dives into each country in the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey (MENAT) grouping alongside the wider regional picture. Building on a theme we've seen consistently in Heat Sink over recent months, Simon Kemp, regional managing partner at We Are Social, told ZDNet that it was the "disparity between the haves and have-nots in MENAT" which stood out, "from t...

As political unrest continues to grip the Middle East, it is hardly a surprise that many international investors are wary about the region’s business prospects. Whether that is warranted or not, the International Finance Corporation, a World Bank Group subsidiary that promotes the private sector in developing markets, is trying to change that perception by stepping up its investments in the financial and power sectors. “We have a strong appetite to do more in the region after the Arab Spring,” said Dimitris Tsitsiragos, vice-president at the IFC. “There are many things to do to help restore confidence as the whole transition process has taken longer than expected and is still ongoing,” he said. Dimitris Tsitsiragos says the IFC has a strong appetite for more investments in the region. One of the IFC’s priorities centers on investing in financial companies to spur intra-regional trade, Mr. Tsitsiragos said. In the past years, for example, the IFC invested in Bahrain’s Ahli United Ban...

In the early 1980s, at the age of 17, Ramzi Haidamus migrated from his war-ravaged home of Lebanon, leaving his family behind. He completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in electrical and computer engineering at California’s University of the Pacific. After graduating he spent seven years working for Stanford Research System (SRS), a firm that designs, builds, and manufactures scientific research products and equipments. He then moved to Dolby Laboratories, a software and hardware company, where he spent 17 years in a variety of roles, most recently as the Executive Vice President of worldwide sales, marketing, and business development. At Dolby he led several innovative efforts, including those related to Dolby’s technological roadmaps and standards development for DVD and BluRay. Recently, he secured the naming rights to the theater where the Academy Awards are hosted every year in Los Angeles (formerly the Kodak; now the Dolby Theater), closing a $200 million USD d...

Q-Cab Transportation, slotted for launch next month, will utilize new technology to enable customers to order taxi services by using mobile applications and social media. The founders are a trio from across the Middle East; Qatari Nasser A. Hatbeen Al-Yafei, Yemeni Ali S. Muthanna Al Yafei, and Palestinian Tariq A. Awadallah, who all graduated from Qatar University as mechanical engineering grads. The three Q-Cab founders all currently working for RasGas, the Qatar-based natural gas company. “The idea of creating Q-Cab derived from my personal experience with taxis in Qatar. I faced some problems when trying to find a taxi, problems such as waiting for a long time and the unavailability of taxis in some districts around Doha. It took about 10 weeks for Q- Cab to have a well-established business plan, which is the duration of the Lean Startup Program- a training and coaching workshop provided by Qatar Business Incubation Center (QBIC) for entrepreneurs,” says Awadallah. One of QBIC’s...

In one sense, successful entrepreneurs seem to say “no” more than the average person. Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, gave this advice to entrepreneurs on HuffPost Live: “The temptation all over the place… is to do more. The brutal reality of trade-offs is you cannot.” He urged entrepreneurs to “narrow their focus.” Entrepreneurs tend to have a vision and must avoid all distractions in order to achieve it. Someone who says “yes” to many things is probably saying “no” to more important things. In another sense, entrepreneurs often hear many “no’s” along the path to success. Young Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.” He went on to build a creative media empire. Steve Jobs was fired from his own organization and returned to build Apple- turning it into one of the world’s most valuable companies. Oprah Winfrey lost her job as a reporter because she was “unfit for TV.” These three visiona...

As the Arab world has become home to the world’s most active gamers, it has increasingly been eyed as a potential hotbed for game development. Back in 2011, estimates put the value of the regional market at $1.4 billion USD, and revenues in 2013 crossed the $100 million threshold in the Middle East. But the space is not too crowded yet, and there is still a big piece of the pie to be distributed between ambitious entrepreneurs interested in getting a seat at the table. One such entrepreneur is Lebanese-Russian Piotr Yordanov and his latest venture, trivia game SwypeOut. At 23, this entrepreneur is already on his third project, having started out with real estate startup BaytBaytak (now shut down), and so-called ‘Pinterest for People’ Beepl. Yordanov’s ambition was clearly apparent during our chat, and he’s clearly applying the lessons he learned from past startups to SwypeOut, which launched earlier in July. SwypeOut is essentially the newest trivia game to come out of the region, b...

In the coming decade, the Arab World will need to create a staggering 75 million jobs - an increase of 40 per cent more than currently exist - to keep pace with the young and fast-growing population set to enter the workforce. However, with the substantial jobs-skills mismatch currently plaguing the region, this much-needed rise in employment may not be achievable. Management consulting firm Booz & Company along with the World Economic Forum and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) have identified various ways in which large employers can significantly bridge this widening skills gap, by adequately leveraging their "ecosystem" - which refers to the collaboration network that large employers nurture with strategic partners, clients, suppliers, educational bodies and government institutions. The region's recent political uprisings require an imminent and urgent response to employment challenges as the revolutions which unraveled have demonstrated that widespre...

Masood Al Awar has an interesting analogy for an initial public offering (IPO): he describes it as being like a wedding night. As the CEO of Tasweek Real Estate Development and Marketing, which is set to launch a AED1bn ($272m) IPO in the fourth quarter later this year, does that then make him the nervous groom? Is he satisfied that everything is in place and it all doesn’t go horribly wrong before the honeymoon period is over? “The IPO is called the wedding night and the listing is the life after, so we have to take care of the listing even more. We are trying to build up the equity story and what Tasweek is all about and where we are going from here,” he says, laying out his proposal. As much as he likes his analogies and catchy metaphors, Al Awar also likes his data and he has certainly done his number crunching ahead of the big day later this year. “We analysed that 60 percent of the IPO requirement — why people want to invest in a company — they base their decision on the fina...