Social Entrepreneurship in the Middle East: Building Education and Awareness Among the Region’s Youth

At times, existing models for addressing social challenges are thrown sharply into question. This is the case for current approaches to youth development in the Middle East: Millions of dollars are invested each year by governments, international donors, and philanthropic organizations in education, training and employability programs, yet nearly one quarter of the region’s economically active youth are still unemployed. There are approximately 110 million people between the ages of 15 and 29 in the Middle East—some are poor and poorly educated, struggling to achieve basic levels of subsistence, while others are university graduates, unemployed or, perhaps, working in the informal sector while waiting to afford housing, marriage and a family. For both groups, economic exclusion is a daily reality.

Fortunately, consensus seems to have emerged around a number of development truisms: First, solutions to social challenges are most effective when they are generated and tested within and by the communities they are hoping to serve. Second, governments can and should create institutional frameworks that are conducive to economic development and provide effective social protection for the most marginalized youth; however, there are many social issues that the government cannot address alone. Third, low-income populations are commanding greater participation in the for-profit economy as consumers, employees and producers, but still face significant barriers to entering the marketplace—barriers that are exacerbated for excluded, low-income youth.[1] Fourth, the nonprofit sector plays an essential role in filling market gaps by connecting poor and excluded young people to needed goods and services, but many nonprofits fail to achieve long-term social impact due to funding volatility and the prioritization of short-term project financing over long-term planning.

What is a Social Entrepreneur?

Many individuals and organizations—social entrepreneurs and social enterprises—are recognizing these realities and capitalizing on these opportunities to advance new models of improving the lives of young people and their families. In the simplest of terms, a social entrepreneur is one who innovates a solution to a social, environmental, or development problem that is 1) sustainable and 2) replicable or scalable beyond the entrepreneur’s local context. Social entrepreneurs can be found in all sectors and industries, connecting low-income and otherwise marginalized populations to clean and affordable drinking water, credit and finance, education and skills development, low-cost health care, clean and renewable energy, communications technology, and environmentally sustainable housing, to name a few examples. They often achieve financial sustainability by earning at least some portion of their income, thus social entrepreneurship is often defined in popular discourse as the application of business methods to addressing a social challenge.

Social entrepreneurship and social enterprise have enormous potential for building human capital and helping develop a culture of engaged citizenship, entrepreneurial skills and attitudes, and high ethical standards. This is even more critical in a world that is growing younger and more urban every day, with record numbers of young people moving to urban areas seeking employment and economic opportunities. Whether led by youth or serving youth, social entrepreneurship will be an important factor in preparing young people to confront increasingly complex and globally interconnected development challenges, such as climate change—including water shortages, pollution, and desertification—population growth and urban migration.

What Can Social Entrepreneurs Achieve in the Middle East?

The Middle East’s youth bulge, too often viewed in negative terms, can prove itself an asset to the region’s development. Young people are often well endowed with the elements needed in social enterprise: an intimate knowledge of their communities, creativity, and solution-oriented mindsets. In the region they are seeking and seizing opportunities for community engagement, with interest in volunteerism appearing to be on the rise from Morocco and Egypt to Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Social entrepreneurship may provide a more rewarding and effective way for them to improve lives in their communities. The 2010 Silatech Index, conducted in partnership with Gallup, finds high rates of entrepreneurial drive among young people in the Arab world, with 25 to 35 percent of young people polled in Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen planning to start a business in the next 12 months. Yet, in the 2009 Index, 72 percent of Palestinian youth and 65 percent of Yemeni youth agreed with the statement: “entrepreneurs think only about their own wallets.” Thus, many of the region’s youth are clearly yearning for business innovation which has more than personal profit in mind. Preparing young people to become social entrepreneurs means encouraging them to identify market opportunities to solve pressing social challenges, thus simultaneously developing their senses of empowerment and responsibility.

Building the Ecosystem for Social Entrepreneurship: Education & Awareness

A supportive ecosystem must be in place to guide young people toward becoming social entrepreneurs and, beyond that, toward implementation and success. To nurture the interest, ideas and practical skills needed to realize that goal, this ecosystem includes mutually reinforcing mechanisms providing social, legal, technical and financial support to would-be social entrepreneurs. In the Middle East, while all these components should be strengthened in parallel, one area of particular focus for policymakers is education. Education systems in the region can be leveraged to support social entrepreneurship in three critical areas:

Developing and strengthening a culture of social innovation and community engagement among youth and communities. Education at the primary, secondary and post-secondary level can foster awareness of local social and development priorities among young people while also rewarding community engagement. Education ministries in the Middle East should promote opportunities for community service across the public school system, while also highlighting successful social entrepreneurs to serve as role models for students. While much of the active engagement of young people in their communities will take place at the secondary and post-secondary level, it is also critical for children and primary school-age youth to be exposed to social engagement and innovation at an early stage.

Teaching youth business and entrepreneurship skills. In addition to fostering a sense of responsibility and connectedness to one’s own community, educational curricular content can also develop the business acumen of students from an early age, so that they know what it takes to bring their social innovations to the marketplace. INJAZ Al-Arab, is one example of an education program in the Arab world teaching students business, entrepreneurship and life skills as part of a regular school curriculum. Such skills and areas of knowledge are essential for subsequent generations to become competitive and engaged citizens and must become integrated into educational systems more widely.

Creating a foundation for knowledge and technical support through higher education. Higher education institutions can also play a critical role in supporting the development of social entrepreneurship as an area of academic research and a potential career path for young graduates. While this is a new area of academic study globally, it is particularly underdeveloped in the Middle East. Higher educational institutions in the region are gradually beginning to support the study and practice of traditional entrepreneurship through competitions, academic programs and incubators however, with very few exceptions, these efforts do not pay specific attention to how entrepreneurial activity can maximize its social impact. Graduate students, in business and non-business degree programs alike, should be actively engaged in providing technical assistance and advising to social entrepreneurs attempting to scale or replicate their community projects. While this will be a professionally rewarding opportunity for students to apply their knowledge from the classroom, the social entrepreneurs will also stand to benefit enormously from such forms of low-cost or voluntary assistance.