Breaking Barriers By Gary Seidman
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- Authors: GARY SEIDMAN
- Published: September 1, 2023
Overview
- Women entrepreneurs in the Arab world are increasingly taking on entrepreneurial roles in business and technology, challenging traditional roles and gender expectations.
- Labor force participation for women in the Middle East and North Africa is 19 percent compared with the global average of nearly 50 percent.
- The trend follows a global pattern that is accelerating innovation and diversifying prosperity, but progress requires confronting social norms and entrenched interests.
Brewing opportunities in Yemen
- Profile: Arzaq Al-najjar, 34, founder of Mocha Valley, a coffee-production and business consultancy based in Sana'a.
- Historical context and market size:
- Nearly 600 years ago coffee beans from Ethiopia were first roasted, brewed, and sipped in Yemen’s Sufi shrines.
- During the 16th century, ships carried coffee from the port of Mocha across the Middle East and North Africa; by the early 20th century coffee became a global commodity.
- By 2021, coffee exports topped $36 billion.
- Today, Yemen exports less than 1 percent of the world’s coffee.
- Mocha Valley activities:
- Specializes in research, training, and development assistance for entrepreneurs, investors, coffee traders, farmers, and partners along the coffee value chain.
- Offers training and promotes quality standards; Al-najjar was the first female “coffee cupper” in Yemen and became a consultant after completing her MBA in Lebanon.
- Launched Mocha Valley five years ago.
- Socioeconomic and conflict-related constraints:
- Yemen’s development ranked 183rd of 191 countries on the UN Human Development Index in 2021.
- World Bank: Approximately 22.5 million people, or about 75 percent of the entire population, require humanitarian assistance, with over 4.3 million civilians displaced.
- IMF estimates that Yemen’s GDP will fall by 0.5 percent in 2023 and that inflation will run at 17 percent.
- Cultural barriers: women face discrimination in business; many deals occur during male-only qat sessions.
- Agricultural competition: qat is a more lucrative crop for many farmers and siphons off farmland and water in a water-scarce country.
- Aspirations and potential:
- Al-najjar seeks to develop and expand Yemen’s coffee value chain so producers and traders can access global markets.
- She is optimistic that greater female participation can make the coffee industry more efficient and cultivate future women leaders in the sector.
Empowering Egypt’s unbanked
- Profile: Fatma El Shenawy, cofounder of Khazna, an Egyptian fintech founded in 2019.
- Mission and services:
- Khazna was built to serve the underserved, connecting Egypt’s unbanked and underbanked with digital access to money, bill payment, and services via a mobile app.
- Provides an income-backed multipurpose credit line for cash advances, bill payment, purchases from a merchant network, and medical insurance.
- Market opportunity and scale:
- Global Finance Magazine: 67 percent of Egypt’s population have no access to formal banking services.
- Mobile phones are in more than 90 percent of Egyptian households.
- World Bank: about 1.7 billion people around the world are currently unbanked.
- Khazna partners include businesses that employ 1.5 million people and Egypt Post to serve their 5 million pension customers.
- Expansion and regulatory environment:
- Khazna has ambitions beyond Egypt, including Saudi Arabia.
- El Shenawy cites shared characteristics between Saudi and Egypt: a progressive regulator open to new ideas and a digitally connected population ready for new financial services.
Regional implications and takeaways
- Female entrepreneurship is contributing to economic diversification, innovation, and inclusion across the Arab world despite low female labor force participation.
- Key barriers include cultural norms, discriminatory practices, conflict and humanitarian crises, resource constraints (e.g., water scarcity), and entrenched informal institutions (e.g., qat sessions).
- Technology and fintech present scalable avenues to extend services to underserved populations, leveraging high mobile-phone penetration.
Policy-relevant points and recommendations
- Support development of value chains (e.g., coffee in Yemen) through training, standards, data, and market access to help integrate local producers into global markets.
- Promote financial inclusion via digital platforms that leverage widespread mobile-phone ownership to reach unbanked and underbanked populations.
- Address gender-specific constraints by:
- Creating targeted training and mentorship programs for women entrepreneurs.
- Reducing discriminatory barriers in business practices and negotiation forums.
- Consider conflict-sensitive development approaches in fragile contexts (e.g., Yemen) that account for humanitarian needs, displacement, and macroeconomic instability (GDP contraction and high inflation).
- Encourage regulatory environments that enable fintech innovation while protecting vulnerable users, as exemplified by Khazna’s model and cross-border expansion ambitions.
Source: Breaking Barriers By Gary Seidman, F&D Magazine, September 2023.
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- Breaking Barriers