Soraya Salti
Students Incorporated
INJAZ on a Mission to Send Arab Youth to
Planet Free Enterprise
Competition was fierce among the teenagers flocking to the Omani desert from across
the Arab World with their corporate mentors on May 6, 2008, to battle for the title of
the Best Student Company in the region. Oman’s Ministry of Manpower rolled out the
red carpet for the topnotch businessmen and -women on the regional board of INJAZ
al-Arab, who flew in to see the unique competition at the Shangrila Resort, an hour’s
drive from Muscat. Under the crossfire of Lebanese TV personality George Kurdahi,
executive teams of high school girls and boys from ten Arab countries also vied for Best
Regional CEO and the Company with the Best Marketing Strategy. While judges
deliberated over the winners, whirling dervishes from Aleppo energized the crowd of
600 guests.
The extravaganza threw the spotlight on the work of a movement that is spreading
across the region in an effort to turn Arab students headed for the ranks of the unem-
ployed into budding young entrepreneurs with a promising future.
Few challenges are more pressing in the Arab World today than finding ways to
absorb the 80 million job seekers who will come out of the pipeline over the next
12 años.
The significant increases made in educational attainment have made little
impact on worker productivity, and employment prospects remain low for Arab
graduates. Such poor returns suggest low quality of education and the failure of
schools to address the needs of the labor market and teach the skills in high
demand.
Arab decision-makers don’t have to look far for an effective model to help
remedy the situation. One is already in use in their own backyard. De
Soraya Salti is Regional Director of INJAZ al-Arab and Senior VP of Junior
Achievement Worldwide.
This case study first appeared in a special edition of Innovations prepared for the
World Economic Forum on the Middle East, 2008, with sponsorship from the Schwab
Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and Aramex. The text of that special edition
is available at http://www.schwabfound.org/sf/Publications/index.htm.
© 2008 INJAZ
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The Youth Unemployment Challenge
While young people constitute a third of the working-age population in the
Middle East and North Africa, they account for half of the unemployed. Este
indicates that joblessness is an issue of youth and that marketable job skills are
not being taught in schools.
(cid:129) The region’s rate of youth unemployment is the highest in the world.
(cid:129) Approximately 65 percent of the population of the Arab World is below the age
de 25.
(cid:129) Eighty million jobs must be created for new entrants into the Arab labor mar-
ket by 2020.
(cid:129) The region has the lowest female labor market participation in the world.
Because the public and private sectors have not created the jobs to accom-
modate the growing cohorts of young job seekers, unemployment rates have
soared and many young people have dropped out of the labor force entirely, y
given up looking for a job. This has raised the unemployment rates of youth in
the UAE to 32%; in Saudi Arabia to 30%; in Bahrain to 40%; in Palestine to
40%; in Jordan to 30%; in Syria to 27%; and in Algeria to a high of 42%.
The creation of meaningful employment and enterprise opportunities for
young people is one of the most critical challenges of sustainable development
in the Arab World. Self-employment must quickly be considered as a career
option by young people in the region.
Sources for data and chart: International Labor Office, the World Bank.
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Students Incorporated
Casablanca to Ramallah to Jeddah, 100,000 students in 11 Arab countries are
learning from professionals in their own communities how to start up enterprises
and create their own jobs.They are acquiring the skills to become employees of
choice by the private sector.
How did this happen? Nine years ago, Junior Achievement Worldwide began
bringing to the Middle East their 90-year-old model, including a series of courses
honed with experience in 119 countries, that prepare youth for the world of work.
Gradually they translated and adapted their course to each Arab locale.
I had never heard of Junior Achievement, when I got a call in Amman, Jordán,
en 2001, asking me to take over the helm of INJAZ (which means achievement in
Arábica), the organization’s first entrepreneurial education program in the Middle
East and North Africa (MENA). After two years of incubation by Save the
Children, INJAZ was floundering. There was little support from the Ministry of
Educación. Social responsibility among local corporations was limited to hand-
salidas. Junior Achievement’s volunteer-based model had not caught on. The staff of
25 were in turmoil and couldn’t concentrate on work. I left the INJAZ office with
serious concerns about their operations.
Sin embargo, when I went to visit the handful of schools participating in the pro-
gram at the time, I began to see the potential that INJAZ held. Going from school
to school, I was overwhelmed by what I found. The government schools, with their
shabby classrooms and beat-up desks, were exactly as I expected them to be. Pero
there was magic happening in the INJAZ classes nonetheless! These were not the
usual classes memorizing for exams. A transformation was taking place. Role
models from the private sector were teaching teenagers about work in the real
world, using a participatory approach we had never seen in Jordan. There was
enlightenment and awakening. Everywhere I went, students were full of excite-
ment and enthusiasm. I fell in love with the model being put into action.
How the Company Program Works
Each semester, business leaders send staff into local high schools, colegios, y
universidades. For an hour each week, these corporate volunteers share their profes-
sional experience, know-how, and success stories with the students to give them
practical training in how to succeed in the private sector. From one semester to the
next, the students progress from learning to manage their own budget to follow-
ing the stock market in the media. They learn about competition, marketing, y
how banks support businesses and industries. While setting up community proj-
etc., they develop skills in leadership, planificación, and teamwork. They gain other
success skills in giving presentations, CV writing, and job hunting.
In the last semester, each class sets up a business venture in JA’s popular
Company Program. Within 15 weeks they must come up with an idea, study its
feasibility, sell stocks, divide into management teams, make a business plan, pro-
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Soraya Salti
duce and sell a product or service, and liquidate the company, often with divi-
dends.
Students graduate with confidence in their abilities, a vision of their career,
and skills to succeed in the private sector. Equally important, they have a small
network of corporate mentors from different sectors they can call on for help.
al mismo tiempo, those who have succeeded in the private sector have the
chance to give a helping hand to the next generation. This experience allows them
to inspire, dirigir, and become a role model for less fortunate youth in their own
comunidad.
The Lesson of Ma’an
The first day I walked into the INJAZ offices, a consultant walked out. Among the
recommendations he left on my desk was, “Close the field office in Ma’an. You
have two staff and no students!” Inhabited by people with strong tribal roots,
Ma’an was one of Jordan’s most radical communities. When I told the staff, ellos
balked. “The students of Ma’an need INJAZ more than anyone else!” they cried.
We called a stakeholders meeting in Ma’an, but it turned into a hornets’ nest.
They accused us of coming to influence the minds of their youth, their most val-
ued asset. The imam in the mosque was preaching against us. The head of the
school district wouldn’t come near us and sent orders to all schools, at his own
expense, not to cooperate. We were shut out. “Who is the strongest female in the
comunidad?” I asked, searching for a voice of reason. And we landed in the hands
of Salfa, the granddaughter of Audeh Abu Tayeh, the tribal leader played by
Anthony Quinn who fought the Turks in Lawrence of Arabia. The principal of a
girls’ school, she was revered as “a brother to any man,” and rightly so. Convinced
of the value provided by our program and ready to challenge the community, she
welcomed INJAZ in her school. With only one Ma’an school to work in, we sent
the staff to surrounding towns to start up more programs.
A year later, we held the graduation of 1,000 students in the main hall of
Ma’an, and invited the same dignitaries we had the year before. But this time,
INJAZ students and volunteers led the event, not us. After the principal closed the
meeting by thanking the head of the school district for his support (thinking he
had indeed supported us), all the other principals ran to sign up. Having seen the
impact of the program on the students, the Ministry of Education official now
wanted his own children to participate and became our strongest advocate. Él
called all the other schools for a meeting to organize our official presence.
That experience gave us courage. Even in the most difficult situations, allá
was a way to mobilize a community. We just had to find a champion and let them
lead as the agent of change. Let the leadership emerge in the community; then our
role would be to support them.
When our first champion in Saudi Arabia, the CEO of Saudi National
Commercial Bank, came to Jordan recently, it was the experience in the Ma’an
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Students Incorporated
governorate that interested him most. He was all ears when the owner of the first
company in the governorate to send volunteers into the classrooms recounted how
he had calmed the fears of his community:
I told them I am a son of this community. This is my chance to help our
youth. We are the volunteers. We are at the head of the classrooms. You
can trust us! Come and join us!
—Muhammad al-Jazi, Owner of the Ghadeer Water Bottling Co. en
Ma’an, Jordán
Thanks to the three champions—the principal, the school district head, y el
owner of the only factory near Ma’an, INJAZ is in every school in the governorate
hoy.
Taking Jordan’s Experience to the Region
As we took Jordan’s version of the Junior Achievement model across the region,
we kept the Ma’an lesson in mind. Using Jordan as a stepping-stone, we put the
onus on our minister of education, Dr. Khaled Tuqan, a nuclear physicist from
CON, to open doors to the other Arab ministers of education. When he co-chaired
the next G-8 ministerial meeting for the MENA region, he began lobbying for us.
The education minister of Bahrain, one of the first to embrace INJAZ, invited the
rest of the ministers to visit their program. Oman and the UAE took him up on
the invitation. In the meantime, Dr. Tuqan sent me, by then regional director of
INJAZ al-Arab, and our deputy director, Akef Akrabawi, as delegates from his
office to the other Arab ministers of education. Arriving in each new country
armed with his strong personal letter of endorsement, we always got a meeting.
Before reaching that point in 2004, sin embargo, we had worked hard to make new
inroads in our partnership with the Minister of Education. To avoid the ministry’s
bureaucracy, we began by giving our courses after school. Sin embargo, unable to keep
the schools open, the kids in class, and the volunteers committed on a continuous
base, we had to keep lobbying for change. As the number of partnering teachers
at our annual Teachers Day began to soar, their mounting force in the field final-
ly moved the ministry to incorporate the INJAZ program into the school day, en
place of the free hour. The next year we aligned more strategically with the voca-
tional education classes. If a volunteer didn’t show up, the students could go on
with their vocational education studies, reducing the chaos.
Scalability was now in sight. We developed an ISO (International Standards
Organization) sistema, the first non-governmental organization in Jordan to do so.
And empowered the ministry hierarchy to mobilize: the V.P. of Vocational
Education became our point person to command this hierarchy. The vocational ed
supervisors in school districts became our monitoring and evaluation arms in
escuelas, observing INJAZ sessions, and motivating teachers to make sure they
cooperated with the corporate volunteer delivering a course in their classroom.
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Soraya Salti
Entrepreneurs Are Made, not Born!
As Wa’ad Taweel silently calculated her answer to the jury, the audience thought
she was struck by stage fright. Two long minutes later, when her contemplations
won her the title of Best CEO of 2008, there wasn’t a dry eye in the audience.
Braving military checkpoints, Taweel and four Ramallah classmates made
their way through the West Bank to Jericho and across the Jordan River to
Amman to compete for the Best Student Company of the Year title, in the first
event of its kind in the Arab World. This significant event was held before 150
top Arab businessmen, funcionarios del gobierno, and educators.
In addition to Best CEO, Taweel and the four vice-presidents of their event
management company, “Teen Touch,” also landed first place for the best-run
company before a jury of five Arab executive directors from regional telecom,
comercio, and banking corporations.
Held by INJAZ al-Arab under the patronage of Queen Rania, last May’s
competition sent a clear message to the Arab private sector: “Entrepreneurs are
hecho, not born.”
Made, ellos son, en efecto! Over a period of four months, Taweel and her 28
classmates took part in the INJAZ Company Program at the offices of the Arab
Bank in Ramallah. Staff volunteers worked diligently with the students as they
set up their company, teaming up the young women with counterparts in the
bank’s HR, finance, operaciones, and marketing departments. With their confi-
dence and talent unleashed, the young entrepreneurs are now one of the bank’s
most precious investments.
Forging its way through barracks, operational instability, financial short-
siglos, and a two-year incubation under Save the Children, INJAZ Palestine has
become an independent registered entity, guided by a strong board. Con
unemployment, poverty, and child labor on the rise, combined with an aging
educational system, it is their hope that these youth will be able to leverage their
skills to meet the demands of a merciless market economy struggling to survive
después 41 years of occupation.
Desde 2005, alguno 15,000 high school students in Ramallah, Nablus, y
Hebron have joined the classrooms of Personal Economics, Leadership, y
Personal Life Planning, as well as the Company Program.
We instituted an annual competition to recognize the school district most effec-
tive in supporting INJAZ and the schools that helped the program excel the most.
Our Most Fervent Supporter
Recognizing the importance of our work from day one, Queen Rania has been our
most fervent advocate ever since 1999, when she launched INJAZ as a Save the
Children project in Jordan. For the last three years she has crisscrossed the region
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Regional Ambassador of INJAZ al-Arab Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan in a ses-
sion with INJAZ students.
as Junior Achievement’s ambassador: drumming up support at the Young Arab
Leaders gathered in Dubai; launching INJAZ in Kuwait, where she grew up and is
considered a beloved daughter; encouraging Arab first ladies to support INJAZ in
their own countries; and rallying powerful business leaders from East and West at
el 2008 World Economic Forum in Davos, Suiza, to join INJAZ al-Arab’s
campaign to Empower One Million Arab Youth a Year by 2018. She really meant
it when she told INJAZ students and supporters in Kuwait, “It is my dream to see
the flag of INJAZ waiving high in every Arab city!"
Boards Must Remain Open
We soon learned that we could only move as fast as members of the private sector
could jump on board. Our first board, appointed by Save the Children, was mis-
takenly based on governance rather than fundraising. While donor funds enabled
us to expand the organization rapidly, we couldn’t move toward sustainability as
long as the board refused to let in larger corporations. When they finally did, 15
top Jordanian business leaders joined the board immediately. This opened the
door for companies to practice corporate social responsibility (CSR) without hav-
ing their own special in-house CRS department. Although the concept of CSR had
been present in Jordan since the arrival of Pepsi, Coca Cola, and the telecom com-
empresas, now everyone could join in. Within three years, the board grew from five
a 35 miembros, and growing the board triggered a national movement!
We learned that JA boards must remain open in order to bring in new mem-
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Success Factors of the Junior Achievement Model
(cid:129) Corporate leaders unite to share responsibility in developing the skills of the
next generation.
(cid:129) A culture is developed in which volunteers from the private sector invest time
in public school classrooms to raise the professional caliber of Arab youth.
(cid:129) Ministries of education endorse this successful private/public sector partner-
barco.
(cid:129) A strong regional infrastructure of country operations is constantly expanding
to meet the growing demand to reach more students.
(cid:129) JA programs are Arabized and rolled out across the region.
(cid:129) The model is scaled up to reach more schools.
bers who can provide volunteer trainers and funds—in the form of an annual
donation from each member’s company—to sustain a growing network of class-
rooms.
Looking for Champions
When my INJAZ Jordan colleague, Akef, and I went regional with INJAZ al-Arab
en 2004, we began to look for more champions—business leaders who would take
responsibility for educating the next generation. The quotas set for hiring nation-
al staff was a compelling argument for the private sector in oil-producing coun-
tries to do so. A mind shift was taking place among the companies compelled to
employ graduates of government schools when they saw how expensive it was. A
fill the quotas, they hired the nationals, who are on their payroll but aren’t produc-
tive staff.
This dilemma caught the attention of key businessmen. It took only one,
Omar Alghanim, to bring the merchant families on board in Kuwait, dónde 93
percent of Kuwaitis are employed by the government. I first saw him at the
Wharton Business School conference for leading family-owned businesses in
Dubai in February 2005. I couldn’t miss him. As he nodded vigorously at every
point I made as a panelist about the urgent need of the Gulf States to prepare their
youth to take the lead in the private sector, neither of us guessed that, thanks to
him, INJAZ would be in Kuwaiti schools that fall, or that he would take the helm
to lead the movement across the region when we formed our regional board two
años después, when he became chairman.
The same thing happened for INJAZ Qatar at the Forbes conference in Doha
in February 2007, where I met Sheikha Hanadi Al Thani, the chairman of Amwal
Capital. A strong believer in education, she was a volunteer teaching in schools and
universidades. We clicked instantly. She found in the INJAZ model a systematic
approach to what she was doing. She is now bringing the private sector together to
lead the formation of INJAZ Qatar.
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Thanks to two Moroccan champions, INJAZ Maghreb was the quickest of all
to get up and running. The Moroccan businessman who headed Jordan Cement
Co. introduced us to the ONA Group, Morocco’s largest corporation and where
he used to work. Their HR manager linked us to their foundation, where we met
Mohammad Abbad Andalusi, who was named a member of the trail-blazing
Ashoka network of social entrepreneurs after founding Al-Jisr, an NGO to help
dilapidated schools. Through 150 school-to-business partnerships, it has renovat-
ed school buildings and created cyber-net cafes and sports clubs. While it
improved school management, it wasn’t developing a new mindset or critical
thinking among youth. In a perfect fit for a total solution, INJAZ would comple-
ment Al-Jisr to raise the performance of both schools and students. On my first
visit to the ONA Group, another champion, the chairman and CEO, Sa’ad Bin
Didi, instantly took the lead. During my next visit to Casa Blanca, he gathered the
business elite into one room and asked them to join him. Then and there, 27 busi-
ness leaders formed an INJAZ board—like what Omar had done at a dinner at his
father Kutaiba’s elegant home in Kuwait, only they were even faster!
In Egypt, when our program was closed down last year, it was our Emirati
chairman of INJAZ Dubai, Sheikh Khaled Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, who came to the
rescue. That was crucial for a country that must create two million jobs each year.
When the Minister of Manpower of Oman, h. mi. Juma’ al-Juma’, heard about
our model, he mobilized the contacts he had made while establishing private sec-
tor committees to nationalize jobs, and he offered to host our second regional stu-
dent company competition. This will send a strong message to other GCC (Gulf
Cooperation Council) countries that they must move quickly to instill the entre-
preneurial spirit in youth to prepare them to take the lead in an economic boom
that has been rising with the price of oil.
Our first champion in Bahrain was a dynamic young woman in the royal fam-
ily. An alumni of Young Enterprise—the Junior Achievement program in the
REINO UNIDO., Shaikha Hessa Al Khalifah tried to contact me a year before we went region-
Alabama, to help her start up a program for her country’s youth. It took courage for the
mother of two to enter the country’s boardrooms in search of corporate support-
ers. When she held her first meeting to form the board of INJAZ Bahrain, the vol-
unteer lawyer came late, thinking he would make more important contacts at the
Rotary Club. When he arrived, he was shocked to find the most influential busi-
ness people in Bahrain at her meeting—and embarrassed that she had already pre-
sented the bylaws that she had drawn up herself.
At the end of our first student company competition in Jordan, the Tunisian
regional director of Shell Oil Company, Mounir Bouaziz, rushed up to me. Después
driving from Damascus in the middle of the night to make it in time to accompa-
ny the Emirates’ finalist team from the girls college he was mentoring in Dubai, él
was bursting with enthusiasm despite his fatigue, saying: “I want you to start
INJAZ in Tunisia! Let me give you the names of an official at the education min-
istry and of leading businessmen who can help you!"
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Turning the Tables on Gender
We were surprised to see that the majority of winning teams from each country
were female, as we welcomed them to our first student competition last year.
Those young women proved to their families and society—and themselves—
that they, también, can hold their own in the market economy. Girls get dynamic role
models in INJAZ. A female volunteer from the private sector delivers most, si
not all, of their INJAZ courses, and all but one of their country programs are run
by young Arab woman. Dina Mofty in Egypt, Dima Khouri in Lebanon, Sulaf
Zu’mot in Dubai, Deema Bibi in Jordan, Rana Kamshad in Kuwait, Nadia Fassi
Fehri in Morocco, Fayza Saad in Qatar, Randa Salameh in Palestine, and Sheikha
Hessa Al Khalifa in Bahrain are joined by our sole male director to date: Shabib
Mamari from Oman’s Ministry of Manpower.
After trying various channels for three years in Saudi Arabia, dónde 90 por ciento
of private sector jobs are held by expatriates, we finally found the perfect champi-
en, Abdulkarem Abu Alnasr, mentioned earlier. When we flew to Saudi Arabia in
April to sign a partnership with the National Commercial Bank to start INJAZ
officially in five Jeddah schools, he sent us to meet the bank’s state-of-the-art CSR
equipo. It boggled our minds to find such excellence and to hear about the bank’s
hunt for strategic solutions to the issue of the unemployment of youth in the
country. Pleased with the cause they began championing last fall by sponsoring the
pilot in two schools of the JA Master Entrepreneur Class. Our host Alnsar summed
up his feelings passionately, “What a great mission to unite us Arabs together for
the sake of our youth!"
In the spirit of the member nations of the Junior Achievement/INJAZ net-
trabajar, those who have made it are now giving a helping hand to the new countries
now emerging. INJAZ Lebanon—another early bird in the process—has also been
a key player in the expansion process: bringing in the staff of new countries to train
with them in Beirut; giving workshops around the region; helping with start-ups;
and sharing know-how.
Today INJAZ operations are in Jordan, Líbano, Palestine, Egypt, Bahrain,
Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Morocco. They will be joined next
by Algeria and Tunisia, followed by Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
Champions from the business community, gobiernos, and educators
joined hands with us in Davos, Oman, and Sharm Al-Sheikh for our regional
board meeting just before the opening of the World Economic Forum in May, y
we are optimistic we will pull together to continue spreading INJAZ to the rest of
the Arab World.
INJAZ can’t solve the whole problem of youth unemployment on its own, pero
we can help train a critical mass of revolutionary young entrepreneurial leaders
who just might do so on their own.
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