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The rise of female entrepreneurs in Lebanon
In Bachoura, a rundown quarter of central Beirut, a quiet revolution is gathering strength. From the balcony of a new office block, the Mediterranean sparkles behind a row of cranes. On a freshly painted roof patio next door, entrepreneurs work at picnic tables laden with laptops and lattes. Amid walls still bearing artillery scars from the civil war a quarter of a century ago, the Beirut Digital District is rising — one of a growing number of spaces in the Lebanese capital dedicated to 21st-century start-ups.
Hala Fadel, a dynamic serial investor who grew up in Paris, is among women in the vanguard of this entrepreneurial revolution. She is chairwoman for the pan-Arab region of MIT Enterprise Forum, a non-profit organisation that promotes entrepreneurship, and began its start-up competition in 2005. Returning to Lebanon in 2003, “everything outraged me”, she says. “But I love the people. It’s not just about making money; it’s entrepreneurship with a mission to change the whole system. This is why I wear so many hats.”
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Once a top-ranking analyst at Merrill Lynch in London, Fadel started a telecom software company after studying business at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Last year she quit her day job in fund management to co-found Leap Ventures, a $71m venture capital fund for high-growth Middle East technology businesses, which launched in March at the sixth ArabNet Beirut. At this huge networking event, Raed Charafeddine, vice-governor of Lebanon’s central bank, hailed an “Arab digital renaissance”, while the telecoms minister, Boutros Harb, pledged improvements to Lebanon’s notoriously slow internet.
The line between social and commercial entrepreneurship is blurring, Fadel says, as everyone wants to create jobs. But with inadequate governments (Lebanon has been deadlocked without a president for almost a year), start-ups are stepping into the breach, to address issues from recycling to traffic jams. Fadel enthuses about Tripoli’s car-free day in 2011, when she organised a rally of 50,000 people and 900 volunteers to raise environmental issues in the northern city. “Twenty-two kilometres of roads were closed for a day. It was the best project of my life.”
Source: www.ft.com