After a three year struggle, Saudi woman launches dual social entrepreneurship incubator programs
Despite notable strides
forward, entrepreneurship in Saudi is struggling; getting
people to leave their well-paid government jobs with lots of
vacation time to step into the unknown is an uphill battle policy
makers are fighting all over the Gulf region. The idea of social
entrepreneurship – where the end goal is not to strike it rich but
rather to enrich a community – may prove an even harder sell in the
Kingdom.
But determined, charity minded individuals like Lujain al Ubaid
are fighting an uninformed public, a glacially slow bureaucratic
process, and the lack of a developed entrepreneurship ecosystem to
empower young Saudis, both male and female, to take steps to
improving the communities they live in.
Al Ubaid’s cites her penchant for social awareness as having
developed from a young age. “As a child, my mother would take me to
orphanages and homes for the elderly around Riyadh. We would donate
our time almost weekly,” says the social entrepreneur on a call
from Saudi Arabia’s capital last week. “These experiences touched
me, these stories changed me. I believe we are obliged to give back
to our community and society.”
After graduating from Al Yamamah
University and working in various fields, Al Ubaid and her partner
Ameerah al Taweel established Tasamy in December 2011, originally as
what she describes as an “umbrella volunteer network,” using her
diverse network of contacts from university, several jobs, and
“just growing up in Riyadh.” Realizing there were already several
organizations doing similar work, she and her partner pivoted in
2012, with the new goal of developing short programs to empower
Saudi youth to take charge of changing their communities.
It’s taken nearly three years to get the necessary permits, even
with Abdelaziz AlGasim, one
of the top law firms in the Kingdom, supporting their efforts. But
finally, this month, the seven-person team is officially launching
Kun, a 60-day program for young people to design and implement
social initiatives to improve their communities, mentored along the
way by relevant professionals in the Tasamy networks.
Last year’s successful pilot program has given the team
confidence in the potential success of Kun, which means ‘to be’ in
Arabic. Of the three pilot projects, the founder outlines one as
having been particularly successful: pitched by 19-year-old Omnia,
the Help Us Help You project was a campaign to raise awareness
about a government hotline which people could call to report street
repairs in Riyadh. The project was “impractical and illogical,” Al
Ubaid laughs. “You don’t see girls working in the streets of
Riyadh. But it demonstrates a willingness to work and a willingness
to change things,” says the founder. Girls like Umnia are wanting
to “roll up the sleeves of their abayas and get to
work.”
Tasamy’s Fellowship Program, scheduled to launch in March, is a
more intensive yearlong leadership program-cum-incubator that will
guide fellows through the process of setting up their social
initiative, including trainings in professional skills, help with
logistics, seed funding, mentorship. At the end of the program,
says Al Ubaid, “we will plug fellows into our investor networks,
allowing them to pitch their ideas.”
Al Ubaid and her team launched these programs to address a
series of problems faced by young, entrepreneurial Saudis they
isolated over the course of their university and early professional
careers. These include governmental challenges (difficult
regulatory environment, slow decision making, inefficient
bureaucracy), environmental challenges (chief among which is a
general unfamiliarity with the concept of social entrepreneurship),
and personal challenges (these can include lack of experience with
skills necessary to successful entrepreneurship).
The unique difficulty women face in attempting to start a
business in the Kingdom straddles all three of these categories, Al
Ubaid says. While she personally was able to avoid the “feminine
challenges,” as she refers to them, “because I had a supportive
family,” it would seem that a supportive family would only take one
so far. Regulatory frameworks and social taboos limiting women from
working independently present obstacles that they must often
surmount on their own.
But while she admits that “dealing with men hasn’t always been
easy,” it’s less the differential in how genders are treated that
is the problem, and more just “a certain inflexible mentality”
pervasive in the Kingdom, one that provides the foundation for
several inefficient institutions.
But the fact that people have been interested in Tasamy’s
projects so far spells hope for the founder, and for her country.
With a minimal new media outreach campaign for the pilot project,
the founder says they received over 400 applications for three
spots in the Kun program; “we expect the same level of interest
moving forward,” she says.
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