Amman is the bustling capital of Jordan, a country with high unemployment rate amongst
the youth, but huge business potential.
A partnership amongst ICT business leaders helps young men and women to turn their ideas
into realities and dive into the world of entrepreneurship.
Nina Aps, a business accelerator set up by two leading Jordanian entrepreneurs, is at
the heart of this partnership.
First of all, we provide them with offices, infrastructure, we provide all that's needed
to function.
We are here with them on a day-to-day basis for mentorship and advice and coaching.
We open doors and network for them.
Fourthly, we provide financial investment from 100 to 300k US dollars.
The work of the partnership has already produced valuable results, including supporting 18 startups
with more than 40% women entrepreneurs and created more than 50 jobs per year since 2011.
Experts 911 is one of them.
At Experts 911, we help small and medium businesses in their IT needs.
Funding the business was not easy.
Oasis 500 and Mina have provided having the support of other entrepreneurs, the support
from mentors, exposure to investors, opening doors in different markets.
Without all of that support, it would have been very, very challenging to achieve what
we have achieved today.
Jordan has a highly educated youth, but many of the ICT experts are university graduates
and there is a shortage of technical skills.
Bashar Khawande, one of the partnership's angel investors, draws attention to this
gap.
The issue here is to have a complete change for the material and content for the education
in the universities.
It will take much time to do this.
The easy solution is to have a training center, big training centers, to bridge the gap between
the outcome of the education system and the private sector.
Companies have to spend time and resources for training new employees.
I had to start a training program internally whenever we hire a newcomer.
The reason is that when they are graduated from the universities, their previous education
has nothing to do with the labor market.
So we spend like four to six months to bring them up to what we need for them to be qualified
as the 911 support engineers.
The tremendous potential of ICT is seen as key for the country development also by its
policymakers.
We established what is so-called the Graduate Internship Program, GIP Program, where the
government helps employ IT graduates and pay half the monthly salary.
It's basically to lower the risk of the employers to take more of these grants and give them
the opportunities to be trained and employed.
The political drive is yet to be matched by a stronger dialogue between public and private
actors and an investment on skills.
Are we born entrepreneurs?
Are we born leaders?
I think that is something you have to earn and to develop with time and it depends on
the ecosystem surrounding you, schools, homes, the whole community in terms of the private
sector or the government.
Each one of them plays a major role to encourage, to put incentives towards creating a vibrant
entrepreneurship ecosystem.
Anybody who has a closer look at the entrepreneurship scene in Jordan and in Amman specifically could
see that it's booming.
The governments are usually in full support, NGOs, government bodies, they're all in support,
private sector, telcos, everybody is doing something.
However, if we really want to have better and more results and more impact, I would rather
see one body that is handling the whole strategic things and the others really doing their jobs
in line and in coordination with this body that is doing this strategy.
Otherwise, it will all be scattered and the benefit would be minimal.
