Young Arab Leaders Launches Entrepreneurship Initiative

Young Arab LeadersYoung Arab Leaders (YAL), the region’s foremost development platform for business, public sector and civil society leaders, recently announced the launch of the ‘Entrepreneurship Initiative’ for 2008-2009.

The Initiative is sponsored by The Dow Chemical Company through its charitable arm, The Dow Chemical Company Foundation, as part of its support for the ‘Arab and American Dialogue Programme’ for 2008 and 2009.

The ‘Entrepreneurship Initiative’ aims to nurture innovation among young, small and medium entrepreneurs in the region and provide them opportunities for training mentoring and networking. Through the programme, they will learn from the experiences of other start-up and early-stage companies in the region and receive mentorship from YAL members.

It will serve as a primary platform whereby small and medium entrepreneurs will be identified, their business plans assessed for capacity building training through a process of mentoring and adopting by more established companies in the region.

Applications for the programme will be invited through an Online Portal, Chapter Announcements and Member and Task Force Nominations. These will be assessed via a selection committee chaired by YAL that will include representatives from ABAN, DIFC Centre of Excellence and Larta, in addition to other members nominated to the Committee by the YAL Regional Office. Selected applicants will then go through the capacity building or the training component of the programme.

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Cisco, World Bank Support Silatech To Help Arab Entrepreneurs

SilatechSilatech is an initiative that was launched by Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missned of Qatar, to develop employment and business opportunities for young people in the Arab region.

Global networking heavy-weight Cisco, which is one of the founding members of Silatech and its global strategic technology provider, has just announced that it is extending its support for the social and economic development initiative, through working to deliver a technology platform for young entrepreneurs and businesses, primarily in the Arab world, to help them to drive programs for economic growth.

They will be developing a collaboration platform including services such as video conferencing and blogging, that will help individuals, businesses and other concerned organizations to collaborate on projects. They also aim to deploy a mix of traditional and social networking tools to connect today’s youth with other entrepreneurs and established businesses across the region.

The two companies also plan to co-operate on the establishment of entrepreneur centers for young people in the region, which will offer training courses on building and growing business and using IT to enable business success.

On the other hand, the World Bank Global Partnership for Youth Investment announced that they would support Silatech through two of its strategic pillars – Thought Leadership and Investment.
They will be offering financial products and business development service support to encourage financial intermediaries to invest in the youth micro enterprise market across the region; in other words, the aim is to  establish a scheme, which would see young people with new business ideas helped when seeking loans from commercial banks.

The Global Partnership will also assist Silatech to reach across the World Bank Group to support youth investment across the Arab World and participate in country-level missions and strategy development that could lead to co-financed and scaled projects and knowledge products based on global best practices.

# Sources: ITP, Zawya