1. Microsoft, ABAN Partner to Promote Middle Eastern Entrepreneurs
In an effort to foster self-employment, job creation, social opportunity, economic diversification, and entrepreneurial and technological innovation in the Middle East and North Africa, global tech giant Microsoft partnered with the Arab Business Angels Network (ABAN) in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Microsoft, through its corporate social responsibility initiatives of Unlimited Potential and Local Software Economies, will proffer its technological expertise and support and market and business knowledge to the partnership to aid startups in Information Technology. ABAN, founded in 2005 by the Young Arab Leaders and Dubai Holding during the Clinton initiative, will connect entrepreneurs to funding through angel investors; the organization manages $10 million in seed capital funding and $5 million for women-led ventures. At the partnership’s launch event, Microsoft and ABAN enabled four promising entrepreneurs to pitch their projects to over 70 prospective investors. Two of the entrepreneurs presented innovative environmental enterprises: Cash Trash, which showcased a new recycling model to reduce pollution, and PolluMap, a software system that maps and tracks city pollution levels. According to business leaders throughout the UAE and the greater Arab world, the partnership is seen as auspicious, for over 100 million Arabic youth are expected to enter the workforce by 2020. And, as research conducted by the region’s universities reveals, between 25 and 50 percent of this future workforce deems self-employment as an attractive prospect.
2. Symposium Sows Seeds to Spread Middle Eastern Entrepreneurship
Microsoft and ABAN’s partnership only widens a trend coursing through the Middle East and Asia. The Gulf Organization for Industrial Consulting (GOIC) and the Intekno Group of Turkey staged its fifth Innovation and Entrepreneurship Symposium in Doha, Qatar. In line with the Intekno Group’s corporate responsibility strategy, and in conjunction with Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University and several Turkish universities, the symposium, themed “Impacts of Innovation and Technology Management on Entrepreneurship,” worked to share entrepreneurial knowledge, experience, methodologies, and innovation techniques to young and rising entrepreneurs.
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3. Entrepreneurship Key to Social Development, ASEAN Director Advises
In the Filipino capital of Manila, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) held its eighth biennial Inter-University Conference on Social Development. Dr. Bounphen Philavong, Assistant Director of the ASEAN Secretariat’s Bureau for Resources Development, Health and Population Unit, exhorted ASEAN members from Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and the Philippinnes to concentrate its human and workforce development not only on education and vocational training but also on training workers in entrepreneurship. Linking entrepreneurial skills to the capacity for greater wealth creation in the region, Dr. Philavong called for the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint to secure greater funding for skills development so that ASEAN members’ respective nations can reap much needed funding in return. The ASEAN Socio-Cultural Blueprint extensively maps out initiatives in social welfare and development, social justice and rights, the rights of migrant workers, environmental sustainability, food security, and protection against natural disasters.
4. Sex Workers Organize Social Enterprise for Social Justice
Exploitation, harassment, and discrimination—all of these nefarious conditions describe the plight of sex workers in India. While they understand all too well that such stigmatization and marginalization comes hand-in-hand with their line of work, the female, male, and transgender sex workers—many of whom suffer additional injustice for being HIV-positive—organized to protect themselves against the abuses they are forced to endure. 150 of the sex workers have turned to entrepreneurship and developed a community kitchen in Mysore in the southern state of Karnataka, India. The organization, known as Ashodaya Samithi, competed against 1,000 other proposals in the World Bank’s Development Marketplace, a grant program that funds innovative and small-scale projects with great promise for expansion. Equipped with a $40,000 grant, Ashodaya Samithi has started its project of empowerment with its kitchen, has already expanded with a handicraft center that sells clothing, and plans to grow further with a community laundry project. But their grant aims at grander goals: diminishing sex workers’ discrimination by initiating healthcare measures, training speakers on the injustices the workers face, promoting positive living, and documenting and addressing every instance of discrimination.
5. Energy Entrepreneurs Light Up the Cleantech Grid
Rob Day and Andrew Friendly, two architects of the Renewable Energy Business Network (REBN), a San Francisco-haling professional networking organization, have drawn the blueprints for a nationwide expansion of their investment in energy entrepreneurship. Cleantech—which seeks to maximize operational efficiency and productivity while minimizing energy consumption, waste, and pollution—will be the thrust of the transcontinental non-profit network with tens chapters, including Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, Los Angeles, Austin, Denver, New York City, Portland, and Washington, D.C. With a social networking website as its hub, the organization will unite entrepreneurs, investors, academics, and other professionals to build businesses on the foundation of renewable energy technologies. Day and Friendly have already secured a number of national sponsors of the new-fangled REBN, including executive search firm Hobbs & Towne, national law firm Holland & Knight, Bostonian law firm Mintz Levin, Bostonian public relations firm Weber Shandwick, Silicon Valley Bank, and Houston’s financial services giant Stanford Group Company. REBN will also be forging a relationship with the American Council on Renewable Energy, a D.C.-based non-profit industry think tank and lobbying group.
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6. Arizona Initiatives Fertilize Rural and Border Communities
The University of Arizona’s (UA) McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship has pioneered the Rural Entrepreneurship Initiatives, a project that endeavors to kindle the entrepreneurial capacities and opportunities in southern Arizona’s rural and border communities. With UA alumnus and entrepreneur Guillermo Quiroga appointed as director, the initiatives seek to heat up the entrepreneurial climate in the region by targeting four critical population sectors through four initiatives. The first initiative is IdeaFair, which will implement the science fair model used in elementary education to stimulate student knowledge of entrepreneurship and problem-based business solutions. The second initiative is Education Curriculum Development, a partnership with local colleges to challenge K-12 students to apply entrepreneurial principles to a wide array of business environments and community-based problems. IdeaXchange, the third prong of the project, will weave a network for nascent and extant entrepreneurs to swap information and receive guidance. The Rural Entrepreneurship Society is the last component, which will channel the experience of area leaders to evaluate regional resources, opportunities, challenges, and policy assessments to help foster successful enterprises and healthy communities. Actively involved in his native Pascua Yaqui tribe, widely credentialed, and widely honored, Quiroga envisions that the initiatives will cultivate local entrepreneurs and enterprises to address the region’s border-based concerns, such as border management and homeland security. The Rural Entrepreneurship Initiatives align with the broader, statewide venture to build local economies and workforces—the IFA, or Innovation Frontier Arizona.
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7. Local Social Entrepreneur Revives At-Risk Youths, City Block
In 2005, working on his Master’s thesis, David Dey of Rochester, New York helped found the Institute of Social Entrepreneurship at Roberts Wesleyan College. Dey soon after founded an offshoot of his institute—Risego, Inc., which seeks to offer area at-risk youth an alternative to the life of drugs, crime, and violence by empowering them to develop profitable and sustainable community-based social enterprises. Dey has continued to work to enact positive change in the Rochester community by establishing The Arnett, a family of businesses in an historic building Dey purchased and renovated out of his own purse. The Arnett houses a number of businesses that strive to make a difference one neighborhood resident at a time. Businesses include Kingdom Ventures, Inc., which imports and sells artisanal goods like handbags and ceramics from developing nations. His Blends Coffee Shop and Lighthouse Copy & Business Services in The Arnett provide locally owned alternatives to their corporate counterparts. The French Quarter Café, an art gallery, an event planning agency, and a counseling/ budgeting agency also offer services to residents who want to support local businesses. But at the heart of The Arnett is Dey’s own Risego, Inc. and Institute for Social Entrepreneurship—the former making entrepreneurship training available to youths, the latter to adults.
