Governments support, communities, talent, funds, role models & case studies, cutting edge software n’ tools, and soon, better broadband & higher Internet penetration, and a great deal of awareness/coverage by media. You’ve got it all.
Take it back to the days when Web meant that big Blue “e” icon. That’s exactly when we read all about the .com boom in the US and all we could think about was if that was real, spending millions of dollars on some Websites?
Silatech is an initiative that was launched by Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missned of Qatar, to develop employment and business opportunities for young people in the Arab region.
Global networking heavy-weight Cisco, which is one of the founding members of Silatech and its global strategic technology provider, has just announced that it is extending its support for the social and economic development initiative, through working to deliver a technology platform for young entrepreneurs and businesses, primarily in the Arab world, to help them to drive programs for economic growth.
They will be developing a collaboration platform including services such as video conferencing and blogging, that will help individuals, businesses and other concerned organizations to collaborate on projects. They also aim to deploy a mix of traditional and social networking tools to connect today’s youth with other entrepreneurs and established businesses across the region.
The two companies also plan to co-operate on the establishment of entrepreneur centers for young people in the region, which will offer training courses on building and growing business and using IT to enable business success.
On the other hand, the World Bank Global Partnership for Youth Investment announced that they would support Silatech through two of its strategic pillars – Thought Leadership and Investment.
They will be offering financial products and business development service support to encourage financial intermediaries to invest in the youth micro enterprise market across the region; in other words, the aim is to establish a scheme, which would see young people with new business ideas helped when seeking loans from commercial banks.
The Global Partnership will also assist Silatech to reach across the World Bank Group to support youth investment across the Arab World and participate in country-level missions and strategy development that could lead to co-financed and scaled projects and knowledge products based on global best practices.