EnvironmentLast WordOpinion

The less we buy, the less we waste

by Alexandre Boustany
written by Alexandre Boustany

Although waste has started to pile up again on the streets due to the fuel crisis and the ensuing logistic difficulties in collection, recycling companies, environmental and activist organizations, including the community-based platform Froz, are noticing a reduced amount of the overall waste generated by citizens and businesses.

The reason behind that? The current socio-economic crisis.

Shifting consumption habits

There is a direct link between consumption rates and waste generation. The higher our income per capita is, the more we consume, and the more we generate waste. One of the most devastating consequences of the current socio-economic crisis is the reduced purchasing power of the Lebanese people.

Instead of throwing huge amounts of food (which, according to the Waste Management Coalition, constitutes over 50 percent of Lebanon’s waste) like they did in times of “plenty,” people at restaurants are making sure not to over-order and to ask for the leftovers to go. In turn, the restaurants themselves are reducing costs by reducing waste. For example, they are reducing the availability of paper napkins and replacing paper menus with digital ones, although that is mostly in order to avoid the prohibitive cost of printing new menus every week due to the ongoing currency fluctuations. Rather than buying bottled water, a number of people are now shifting to water coolers and reusable bottles, saving around LBP 112,000 and 112 single-use plastic bottles per individual every month!

Other examples of reducing waste abound. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Instead of showering their customers with plastic bags, many supermarkets are now making sure each bag is fully loaded, while some markets even charge a small fee for the bag[/inlinetweet], reducing the amount of single-use plastic bags being thrown away.

Rather than using virgin materials, a number of small local manufacturers are opting to source their materials from recyclable waste. Instead of sending their waste to landfills, a number of companies and organizations are opting to sell their recyclables to manufacturers as raw materials for new products – a win for both their pockets and the environment.

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]We are buying less: we have started to think about what to buy, how to reuse what we have, and what to give away.[/inlinetweet] In short, our consumption habits are changing, which has reduced the amount of waste we generate. According to Froz’s e-commerce metrics, for example, sales of reusable menstrual cups have recently increased. Due to the increase in price of single-use pads, many women are now shifting to reusable alternatives, saving both money and the environment. Today, Froz’s platform promotes a large variety of products made mostly by local independent artists and small businesses from different recycled materials such as Dhalu’s recycled glassware, terrazzo plant pots incorporating shredded plastic by JP Recycle, BTDT’s recycled paper notebooks, and others. Such products not only make reducing waste convenient and engaging, but also create income for small businesses.

Furthermore, the “Shop Local” movement has soared. Due to the high prices of imported goods, people are opting for local more affordable brands. This not only encourages local brands to improve the quality of their products, but also helps reduce large amounts of CO2 emissions from international transportation of imported goods.

A crisis to solve another

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]The current socio-economic situation is by no account a good thing, but we can’t ignore the fact that we can use it as an opportunity to build better consumption habits – habits that help us solve the waste crisis.[/inlinetweet]

Reducing waste seems promising, but what happens when the socio-economic crisis is over? Shall we go back to overconsumption and generating high amounts of waste? We are creatures of habits, so it depends a lot on the habits we build today.

We can use this crisis to our benefit and take the small steps required to build these new positive habits:

1.     Purchasing local and eco-friendly products

2.     Recycling household waste through Cedar Environmental, Recycle Beirut, and others.

3.     Following social media awareness pages like “gogreensavegreen” for tips and hacks.

4.     Reducing food waste by saving leftovers or donating excess food close to its expiry date to people in need through the FoodBlessed NGO.

5.     Buying spices, grains, and other groceries in bulk from local stores.

6.     Buying fresh produce and preserves from local producers directly or through markets like Souk El Tayeb or the Arcenciel NGO’s Beit el Mouzareh.

What new habits are you willing to build?

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
policy

Building up to harassment-free workspaces

by Ceem Haidar
written by Ceem Haidar

On December 21, 2020, Lebanon passed the landmark Anti-Sexual Harassment Law No. 205, which finally brought the disconcerting matter to light, providing a starting point to criminalize sexual harassment and offering protections for victims of gender-based violence. Law No. 205 comes after years of lobbying and activism from various groups within the country, such as efforts led by the Center for Inclusive Business and Leadership (CIBL) for Women, along with its partner network and in coordination with activist groups. They consider the implementation of the law as a solid starting point to work toward decreasing the levels of gender-based violence, particularly in the workplace.

“It has been years since feminist activists, gender machineries, individual politicians and human rights organizations have been pushing for protections, drafting legislative suggestions, and mobilizing for change,” shares Charlotte Karam, PhD, adjunct professor and director of international partnerships at CIBL for Women. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]“Although the new Law No. 205 is far from perfect, it is an important milestone in the trajectory of efforts to ensure safer workplaces for women and other vulnerable groups,”[/inlinetweet] she comments.

The key challenges tied to the law concern the proposed fund by the Ministry of Social Affairs, intended to offer support to the victims of sexual harassment and to rehabilitate the perpetrators. The Ministry’s ability to establish the fund, given the current economic crisis and the limited financial capabilities of the Lebanese government are being questioned. In addition, the lack of mechanisms to safely report gender-based violence is still not covered under the law.

A rising number of gender-based violence cases, many go unreported

As is the case in most contexts around the world, when the level of external stresses increases, a rise in violence against women is seen. Lebanon is no different. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]The escalation of gender-based violence in Lebanon is alarming, with a recent surge in the number of cases reported formally and informally over the last few years.[/inlinetweet] According to the Gender Based Violence Annual Report – 2020 issued by UNFPA Lebanon, women and girls are heavily impacted by harassment, on the streets, at work and online, with cases significantly on the rise, especially after the COVID-19 outbreak.

At present, the economic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the repercussions of the Beirut Port blast, are contributing to increasing vulnerability and therefore exposure to risk. Those most at risk in Lebanon, according to the UNFPA report, are elderly women, women and adolescent girls, individuals with disabilities, migrant workers and the LGBTQ+ community. Concerned stakeholders, including public sector offices, legal bodies, civil society organizations, and employers are not properly equipped to deal with the growing number of gender-based violence cases in the country. Indeed, even before the crises hit, little legal recourse existed to provide legislative protections. At work, for example, very limited legal recourse was available to protect employees against sexual harassment. The persistent lack of anti-sexual harassment policies and associated reporting mechanisms to ensure the required victim and witness protections is hindering progress towards safe and equitable workplaces.

While official data pertaining to sexual harassment and gender-based violence in the workplace collected in Lebanon and across the region is still scarce, findings from the regional KIP Index by CIBL for Women at the Olayan School of Business (OSB), American University of Beirut (AUB), show that the absence of formal sexual harassment and discrimination policies force women to leave the workplace when subjected to such incidents, a prevalent finding across the Arab MENA region.

What does the law offer victims, employers and the general public?

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]The Anti-Sexual Harassment Law No. 205, does not limit the protections against sexual harassment to just the workplace, but also covers harassment in “any place.”[/inlinetweet] The law also takes into consideration the dynamics of power and authority in social relations, and provides varying degrees of punishment based on the crime and the perpetrator’s status. For example, should the perpetrator have a position of dominance or authority over the victim, a heftier punishment applies, the penalty increases and incidents do not have to be recurrent. Moreover, heavier penalties have been imposed, as per the law, related to cases where the perpetrator is a supervisor or a public officer, if the perpetrator abused of their right or if the victim is a minor or has special needs. In the last case, the offence becomes a felony and is no longer considered as a misdemeanor.

With the passing of the law, perpetrators of sexual harassment could spend up to four years in prison and pay hefty fines (up to 50 times the minimum wage). Furthermore, the law does not exclude the possibility of disciplinary sanctions that the perpetrator may face at work, and guarantees the victim’s right to claim compensation for the moral damages incurred. Protections from potential retaliation in the workplace is also included in the law for both the victim and any witnesses.

The main concerns with Law No. 205

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Seemingly absent from the law, are formal and safe channels of reporting sexual harassment, as well as recommended legal actions for victims. [/inlinetweet]In addition, the wording of the law leaves much room for interpretation, and can be taken out of context. CIBL for Women, along with its partner network including UN Women, the Government of Canada, UNDP, the Government of Sweden, The Lebanese League for Women in Business (LLWB), ABAAD and Seeds for Legal Initiatives, have been working to raise awareness on what constitutes sexual harassment and gender-based violence, interpreting the law for the general public for it to be effectively applied. They have also been actively working with Lebanese employers to support them in applying the law through supporting the drafting of internal policies, hosting workshops to equip them with the tools needed to effectively implement and enforce the law in the workplace.

Mitra Tauk, equity/title IX coordinator at AUB believes that[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””] Law No. 205 should provide clearer definitions, to avoid room for misinterpretation of the law, which may be affected by “unconscious biases of people, and more seriously, of the decision maker.”  [/inlinetweet]

The new anti-sexual harassment law also fails to provide support or further information for employers in the implementation of the law in Lebanese workplaces – which is deemed indispensable in the fight against sexual harassment. So what can employers do to better cultivate safer workplaces and to ensure that the law is enforced? 

With anti-sexual harassment policies in place, how should employer cultures shift?

Employers need to have clear policies in place that are customized for their work environment, acknowledging the specifics of the workplace and industry context.

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]The policy should start with a commitment to a safe work environment and provide a clear and comprehensive definition of what constitutes sexual harassment, including verbal and non-verbal advances.[/inlinetweet] The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines sexual harassment as “a sex-based behavior that is unwelcome and offensive to its recipient.” Sexual harassment exists in two main forms, the first is related to job benefits, whereby promotions, pay increases or job security are linked to different forms of forced or suggested engagement in sexual behavior. And the second form is through intimidation or humiliation of the victim, creating an uncomfortable workplace setting. Employers also need to affirm that sexual harassment is a form of gender based violence that can happen between the same and opposite sex / gender parties. In doing so, employers can begin to ensure a safer working environment, free from sexual harassment, with zero tolerance policies in place. Including specific examples is very important as it assists in leaving little room for misinterpretation.

In addition, internal policies should also include zero tolerance clauses, clear reporting systems, investigation options and outcomes, internal dispute resolution methods/options, disciplinary measures and sanctions, as well as consequences for intentionally false accusations or void complaints.

Employers must also take all necessary measures to ensure the victim/survivor’s protection and the protection of the witnesses, at all stages of the initial and preliminary investigation and during formal and legal procedures. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]The law clearly states that no discrimination or infringement of the legally established rights may be directed at the victim/survivor who refused to submit to acts of harassment. [/inlinetweet]In other words, employers cannot, whether directly or indirectly, punish or infringe on the victim/survivor’s terms of pay, career development, transfer, or renewal of work contract, nor impose any disciplinary penalties against them.

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]“An integral and effective anti-sexual harassment policy must ensure a safe working environment free from sexual harassment through a zero-tolerance policy,” [/inlinetweet]shares Layal Sakr, attorney at law at SEEDS For Legal Initiatives. She states that workplace protections can be improved by putting in place “clear reporting, investigation and sanctioning mechanisms, along with ensuring equality, confidentiality and protection of victims and witnesses,”

She adds that in the case of a sexual harassment claim, “the employers’ role is integral, to try and engage and educate the victim about the investigation process and outcome, to make well informed decisions. Employers when met with cases of sexual harassment, need to take it upon themselves to commit to a thorough, prompt and confidential investigation (where possible) of the reported incident/complaint. And, in cases where it is proven that the incident did occur, the employer should punish the harasser in a manner proportionate to the enormity of the act.“

Another key element is for employers to ensure that they devise a strategy for implementation for clear communication of the policy and training for staff and managers alike. Having a carefully worded anti-sexual harassment policy does not suffice, for internal workplace cultures to shift. The purpose of the policy needs to be central to its implementation, and ongoing awareness sessions and workshops are needed to ensure employees understand it, and are not afraid to “use” it. These sessions can be used to encourage employees to “speak up” and in doing so, break taboos and stereotypes. According to Joelle Bou Abboud, HOLDAL Group’s general legal counsel & SDG 5 ambassador, 360 degree awareness sessions are an integral part of the company’s change management journey and overall social promise.

“Alongside releasing an internal sexual harassment policy, continuous awareness sessions have been fundamental – for the “victim” to know that she or he has been through qualifies as sexual harassment and she or he has all the tools to do something about it,” says Bou Abboud. HOLDAL is also working to raise awareness on sexual harassment (and any other form of harassment) in the workplace at every stage, to break the stereotypes, starting with onboarding sessions, then implementing daily monitoring and instant reporting mechanisms. 

“The policy and the process are of utmost importance, but beyond this, the ownership and engagement of all internal and external stakeholders is required for safer workplaces,” Bou Abboud opines.

Finally, internal anti-sexual harassment policies also need to be improved and tailored over time based on the size of the organization, the unique experiences of employees and any challenges that may impact the business or its employees.

Can Lebanon be free from sexual harassment?

Sexual harassment and gender-based violence are prevalent across the globe, even in countries with zero tolerance policies and harsh punishments for the perpetrators. CIBL for Women believes the passing Law No. 205 is an encouraging first step to protect the Lebanese community and in specific, employees, from being subject to sexual harassment and gender-based violence. However, without the enforcement of the law within public and private institutions, as well as clear and safe reporting mechanisms, perpetrators will continue to subject innocent victims to abuse, and victims may continue to suffer in silence.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Economic roadmap

Economic Framework

by Executive Editors
written by Executive Editors

The Economic Roadmap 4.0 complements the emerging political will, doctrine, and resolve, which centers Lebanon’s well-being.

At Executive, we have recommitted to our purpose and promise. We are more conscious than ever of the toxic complexities that riddle our political security and military realities. The euphoria of the promise of a different tomorrow has eased and realism has matured. Today’s discourse promises agreement and negotiation, both necessary for an elevated reflection over possible alternatives.

We invited diverse, great minds to examine in-depth topics like corruption, poverty, labor, entrepreneurship and healthcare, and elevated and updated corresponding policies and measures. The outcome is collective and collaborative; and when the time comes, we hope that this rigorously researched, in-depth Roadmap will serve as an action plan for Lebanon’s deliverance.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
BusinessEntrepreneurshipQ&A

A vision for the private sector: unity and innovation

by Thomas Schellen
written by Thomas Schellen

The Rassemblement de Dirigeants et Chefs d’entreprises Libanais (RDCL) is one of several assemblies for corporate leaders of Lebanon. On June 30, 2021 the RDCL elected a new board, led by Nicolas Boukather as the president of the venerable organization that has stood since the 1980s for representation of free enterprises, private ownership, economic lobbying, and the improvement of the economy. Executive was eager to understand the RDCL’s new direction and the new president obliged us by consenting to an extensive interlocution.

I was very curious about one statement that you just made during our mutual introductions, which was that we have to start changing with ourselves. So I presume from this that, as an organization and as individuals, the members of RDCL are cognizant of this need for internal change of themselves. How do you expect to go about it, is it possible at all to have energy for working on own improvement in a time when everybody is fighting for survival?

Yes. And in order to have that energy, we have to think about the future and not only about the past. It is normal to start talking about the past whenever you have a crisis. Just think about a married couple that argues about what happened and caused a problem. But before trying to mediate this discussion, [we need] to think about tomorrow. Think about the coming five years. Think 10 years [ahead]. [Editor’s note: Boukather proceeds to play a video of the new RDCL message].

I understand that you recently convened a historic meeting where you presented and discussed this message of thinking about tomorrow. Is it correct that this meeting for the election of a new RDCL board was groundbreaking in terms of length, content, and outcome?

Yes. The meeting ran for a full day on June 30. It started at 8:30 in the morning and ended at 7:30 at night.

But the main idea is to engage people within the country. And this is exactly what I started doing. RDCL is not only about the president, it’s also about people in RDCL who are tremendously educated. Really, you have people inside of RDCL that need somewhere to express themselves to create change. This was expressed also in the meeting and the number of people who came to listen and see this core message and elect our new board and president; there was a quorum of 98 percent of the 154 members. This is huge, given the actual circumstance when companies are really falling apart and people are obliged to focus on saving their own lives and companies. But they came and they voted. And they elected three men and three women [to comprise the new board]. Many of [our members] are getting engaged, and we’re happy to follow the lead and take action. [Shortly after the board election] we confirmed our new structure and started to write down new bylaws for RDCL with the support of specialists in the fields. So concerning the vision and mission of RDCL our work is in progress.

Beyond the video message that you have just shown us, is there something that you can already share about the new vision and mission of the RDCL?

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]The vision of a businessman and the mission of a business movement has to be modified to accompany the new Lebanon we aspire for.[/inlinetweet] I am thus looking at RDCL [from the perspective of] rebuilding a new organization. I believe that RDCL became a startup. Whenever you have a startup, it means you may have to pivot. Or, if a company has failed to pivot, but has a name that is a very strong name and has a history where it has done a lot, [you work with that]. You should know that RDCL was established in 1986 when the country was in total collapse. RDCL wanted to unite all the business people – this was the mission – around liberalism, equality of chances and to have a role to play. This mission wasn’t fully achieved. So the new vision has to include the concept of connecting members, [mitigating] disputes, building the future, and bridging with other organizations. [In the vision] there is also a really strong message advocating social and economic roadmaps and innovating SMEs. It’s an organization of people belonging to companies. [The companies work] in different private sectors but the people are on all levels of their companies, not just CEOs.

About two years ago, in August 2019, the Business Roundtable, an influential group of corporate leaders in the United States, announced that they had rewritten their definition of “The purpose of the firm.” The previous definition that they had used since the late 1980s had been the one of shareholder interests, but any corporations shifted their thinking to be more aligned with ideas of stakeholder capitalism. It was something of a conceptual revolution of corporatism. In their annual Davos meeting in early 2020, the World Economic Forum also released a declaration on stakeholder capitalism. What is the definition of the firm that the RDCL uses?

The United Nations are very clear about the importance of [environmental, social, and governance] ESG standards and about implementing the [sustainable development goals] SDGs. I believe that SDGs should be not only advocated but implemented. Today this is more easily said than done, given the collapse [of the economy]. However, [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]I believe that the great reset on how to reset Lebanon after everything has dropped, might happen if we lead by example. So if we lead by example, this might be a chance, an opportunity for Lebanon, to build back stronger.[/inlinetweet] By what you call a prototype or a pilot, Lebanon in this case can be a pilot project for the world, but we need achievable projects and governance. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]SDGs can [be realized] in leapfrogging the ecosystem of innovation. Lebanon can be a pilot project, and [countries] can learn from their mistakes and use the same model afterwards. [/inlinetweet]

But besides the ESG and SDG targets, how do you view the idea that under stakeholder capitalism the purpose of the firm relates not primarily to shareholder gains but to the inclusive benefit of all employees and external stakeholders, from customers to ancillary organizations and society at large?

[I want to give] you my personal experience. I’ve had the chance to know Michael Porter who has redefined the future of corporate values, calling it CSV, the corporate social value. And this is where we talk about stakeholders around the company. I had a chance to get Michael Porter’s insights on the corporate social side, the CSV, and he was explaining to me the move from [corporate social responsibility] CSR to CSVs. So to answer the question, it is not the CSR, which we all know, but it’s the CSVs [that matter]. 

When discussing the role of RDCL as industrial lobby organization, would you consider an aspiration such as becoming a universal corporate forum, quasi a World Economic Forum on Lebanon level, meaning an organization where membership is by invitation so that corporations can be members, including their C level executives, but also certain outsiders such as civil society leaders and thought leaders? Does your vision include plans to lobby for a legal model of social enterprises in Lebanon, which are considered as beneficial companies but where currently no specific incorporation and registration status exists?

What you’re saying is absolutely right. However, we need to not oversell. My fear in life is to say something not right. I know what you’re saying is correct because I accompanied many entrepreneurs in trying to create comprehensive [social] choices, and the law does not provide for it. One mission of RDCL would be to give them the opportunity to have this [social enterprise] choice. And in response to the first part of your question: of course, I invite NGOs and CSOs to join as members. And at the end of the day, their engagement is huge. Also a lot of publishing has been done on so many topics. Here I want to salute the work that has been done by my predecessors after the war when the RDCL created groups of propositions. So just to explain [options for memberships from civil society], the structure exists. They just need to knock on the door to come in.

RDCL is a well-known organization of industrial leaders but there are other lobby groups and sectoral business organizations. Would RDCL seek a role to be a sort of umbrella for more specialized associations, for example the insurance association ACAL or the automobile importers’ association, or arbiter between different other industry groups that sometimes seems to even compete for influence in Lebanon?

I on purpose do not use the term arbiter because I understand the difficulty of arbitration in cases where you have power. I have two terms that I use instead of arbitration. The first term is to “lead by example”. The second term is “we don’t want to take credit.” [As president of] RDCL I don’t want to take personal credit for anything that will happen on my watch. It doesn’t have to be credited. But what I want to put on the table is the idea of dialogs between disciplines, that idea of, say, discussing with each other, opening the door to negotiation. An example might be to have a neutral place for [two parties] to come for dialog. And if we know or don’t know [what is said], we don’t care. But what we care about is not taking credit. Then a lot of things will happen.

How high is the risk in your assessment, that RDCL will face challenges where people would try aligning the organization with a political camp? We have seen different partisanships of economic organizations in the past.

Very good question. You know, I am an entrepreneur, and when you launch a startup, you have 1 percent chance of succeeding, correct? I would like to say it this way, that we have a 1 percent chance of succeeding. Is it worthwhile doing it? I think, Yes.

Will the business model of RDCL change? Or what model of funding the organization will you pursue?

That I can answer directly. Today companies in Lebanon are tired, financially tired. There are fees to [be paid] by members of RDCL [and these] will continue. [But] increasing the fees is not at all our plan. We cannot ask them for more. It’s impossible. However, this is not enough to finance our plan, which is very ambitious. The idea is to create what we will call “Friends of RDCL.” But a very diligent process will happen to make sure there are no conflicts of interest.

The description of “Friends of RDCL” evokes in my mind an association with the Friends of Lebanon conferences of past decades. Will there be an investment element in the friends of RDCL? Will this group be purely donation oriented or will it offer things such as sponsorship with name recognition?

I think that people want to help without being recognized; they just need to believe in the mission. I think requirements will be set and clearly defined, the audit process will happen. This is why we have four subcommittees on the board. One of them is the governance committee.

What you are saying is that governance will be very important. Can you give us the info on the other committees?

The four committees to be created are the membership committee, the governance, the audit committee, [and the] fundraising committee. When you believe in something, you need to support it. And we’re willing to welcome corporate donors or international donors in order to support us financially while we are dealing with the mission that we have started on and for which we have a four-year plan. [Our goal] in terms of numbers would be to, after that time, finance [activities] from the membership fees and I would maybe want that dollars in the bank to be different from the dollars we have now.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Education planEntrepreneurshipQ&ASpecial Report

Sustainable job creation through eduployment

by Thomas Schellen
written by Thomas Schellen

Workforce Lebanon is a recent initiative that one can see having been spliced from DNA strands of entrepreneurship, education/upskilling, and job matching. Executive conversed with Nadim Zaazaa, managing partner of Nucleus Ventures, the entrepreneurship hub which hosts Workforce Lebanon. The interview was transatlantic.

How are you connecting to Lebanon in your mind these days? 

My heart is broken over what is happening in Lebanon and wherever you go you feel that you have an anchor called Lebanon weighing you down. 

How is the program Workforce Lebanon designed? 

The program is designed for students to learn either fully virtually or in a hybrid environment any skills that will lead them to land a job in the technology sector [working] either remotely or in person.

The headline of your public relations blurb on Workforce Lebanon says that you are on a mission to create 1,000 jobs in tech. This is different from creating a skill base of employability in 1,000 people. Is your aim more about the skill base expansion or about the job creation in Lebanon? 

The idea of Workforce is not just to enhance skills. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Workforce is an eduployment offering, which means that we also work on relationships with employers.[/inlinetweet] We are leveraging our knowledge of the sector through a relationship with employers which is long-standing as an accelerator since 2015. We are building a network of employers and we usually offer employers a role in designing the programs and determining which profiles they are looking for so that the student is matched with the most fitting employer when he graduates. This approach to employment is in fact quite trending now, especially in the US where [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]employers are reverse engineering the learning journey that a prospective employee needs to go through in order to be job-ready from [the first day] when they join their company.[/inlinetweet] This is what workforce is about. It is the intersection between the employer and the skills required between basic education, college education, and job-ready skills. 

Does this mean that the WOZ organization of Steve Wozniak, which is a partner of the initiative, is also involved in this aspect of the Workforce program or are they only involved by way of the coding school partnership they have with you? 

WOZ is a content partner. We are in partnership with their affiliates but we also have other jobmatching partnerships. For example Lebnet is going to offer mentoring our graduates, Notre Dame University – the one in Indiana in the US – is offering access to the US market on the back of their support in getting students job-ready, meaning they are supporting students primarily in preparing for interviews and applications. 

Your online project description does not really spell out the minimum requirements that prospective enrollees have to have before they join the program. I would imagine that they would have to have a college education, perhaps at least a bachelor’s degree in something related to IT. Is that so? 

To the contrary. Any person interested in learning can approach us. We have many programs and students can have anything from basic internet skills and take longer/bigger programs to prepare them for the basic jobs, or they can be college graduates with degrees in computer engineering who are looking to beef up their profiles with very specialized skills. It [can be] anything in between. 

So it would be correct to say that a prospective participant in the workforce Lebanon program does not have to have an IT degree from a university? 

Yes. They key message is that there are multiple programs that require different skill levels so if you have basic knowledge of internet you can apply to the basic programs and you can also be a developer and apply for more advanced programs to give you a specialization or an edge. You can even be an advanced coder and take courses that help you in your career as well. Our offering is flexible in that regard. 

With regards to the jobs that people can hope to find after their graduation from the program, would the main prospects be in form of remote working from Lebanon or would there also be jobs that could involve people going abroad to join a company? 

The idea is that they end up working remotely in Lebanon, yeah. However, we do not restrict them from traveling if they end up traveling. We also have partnerships with universities, especially our partner [Lebanese American University] LAU to host some of those teams through industry spots there and enhance their chances of landing jobs with industrial partners of these universities. So they can work with international companies through our hubs in these universities, especially LAU. 

In developed economies, latest hourly numbers of employee contribution to GDP is above $50 per hour worked. Employee productivity in mature IT firms should normally be fairly high when compared to other industries. In startup tech ventures, this productivity is not necessarily as high in the early years. Would you expect that each one of the 1,000 jobs would have a specific implied productivity, like have to come with let’s say $200,000 in annual productivity?

We measure impact differently. We look at what is called the multiplier effect which says that one job in technology is equivalent to five jobs in adjacent sectors. You also want to see the cluster impact, meaning tech companies in Lebanon will then start working with service providers so you look at what impact these companies will have on their suppliers and providers in Lebanon. You also look at average increase in household income through the jobs created. 

But if the people are working remotely with overseas companies, would the multiplier effect for the local economy still be the same as if they were hired by a tech company here? If someone is for example working remotely, and perhaps cooking at home instead of ordering delivery to the office every day, how would the equation of redistribution of income to the community be changed? 

You are right. People working remotely is a novel situation and even in the US there is now a big question mark about where one pays taxes, where you reside or where you are employed. Those two are very different. It is an interesting and novel problem. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]For us the idea for now is that these people are generating income and bring in foreign income to the country, and will be spending it in Lebanon and be able to help their families. [/inlinetweet][The Workforce project] is more focused on the context of poverty alleviation and sustainable job creation than to be able to really measure the impact in detail, especially given how dysfunctional the situation is right now.

Are the opportunities thought to become long-term jobs or is there a large gig-economy aspect to the workspace Lebanon idea, given that remote working is the default idea?

[There are different options]. We have for example recently partnered with [Bridge. Outsource. Transform] in the field of data science services so that they can work with our graduates to offer the project management layer of outsourcing services as far as data processing and data sciences services to bill the clients. This is what they do and we collaborate with them in order to make sure that our graduates have a consistent route to the labor market and find opportunities that are more sustainable and being nurtured by other players in the ecosystem. We are exploring another similar partnership with the likes of CME who are a globally renowned development services company and software solutions provider. We are working with these employers and the LAU industrial park is also a destination where we can plug out talent so that they are working remotely and do that sustainably from Lebanon. 

Are there any commercial investors in the Workforce Lebanon project who would expect a financial return? 

No. Workforce is for the time being an impact [investment] initiative. We are funded by donors such as [United Arab Emirates-based] Al Ghurair Refugee Education Fund in partnership with DOT – Digital Opportunity Trust Lebanon. We also have [the United States Agency for International Development] USAID as a partner supporting us, and at this moment we have around 190 students in our programs. None of them pays a penny. 

Over what period have these 190 students been enrolled? 

We started in January, so we have been operating the program for about six months. 

Can you say anything about your expected attrition rate, or inversely the retention rate of enrollees? 

We are looking at 60 to 80 percent retention rate. At the time being [retention] is about 60 percent and we want to push this up to 80 [percent], meaning a drop-out rate of 20 percent. Ideally, Thomas, [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]we want to have 1,500 students supported to run through the Workforce program, of which 1,000 would actually land jobs. [/inlinetweet]

How many of these prospective 1,000 job owners would then actually find gainful employment in Lebanon and produce something locally for Lebanon, do you imagine? 

I can’t answer that. I don’t know the exact figure. We did not look at this and also we don’t see a difference between jobs created in Lebanon for Lebanon or jobs created in Lebanon for abroad. I [will be able to] tell that a few months down the line, once we start having a sustainable [supply] of graduates.

But in terms of the labor skill base in Lebanon, you would contribute to improving it wherever the graduates go? 

Absolutely. There are two KPIs for us. One the number of students we train – which is 1,500 at least – and [two], the number who land sustainable jobs. 

If we note that there does not seem to be a large majority of people who want to stay in Lebanon these days, would the Workforce Lebanon program seek to block further brain drain? 

We are solving these one problem at a time. One thing we are considering is the creation of a sort-of income sharing agreement for our graduates, so that, if they do leave the country, pay back whatever scholarship they got which will then enable us to train another person. Effectively this is creating a circular impact. 

So a social impact circular economy sort of thing? 

Yes. If you land a job and leave [the country] all we ask is that you pay back what you received from us in scholarship so that we can sponsor a new student. 

I suppose that would be a voluntary obligation, or would it be a contractual one? 

We could make it a contractual one. I think this would be a very fair aspect. 

Does the overall program have a built-in time duration or date of expiry? 

We hope to achieve the 1,000 [graduates who find jobs] as soon as possible and this is our first hurdle. We will work tirelessly to provide scholarships and run programs until we have secured 1,000. That will be our first achievement. 

So would there be a possibility that after exhaustion of the current grant money, you would look for follow-up funding?

We are talking to a lot of donors. We are sprinting toward that first objective but that doesn’t mean we will stop at that. We will build on this for sure in the future.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Special Feature

Afghanistan’s Bounty

by Adam Pletts
written by Adam Pletts

Tracking the global network of an opiate economy

After seizing power in Afghanistan, the Taliban have promised to put an end to opium production, while the country remains the world’s largest illicit opiate supplier after a decade of failed efforts to eradicate its trade. A sincere pledge or empty words?

Before the dust settles in the country, it is still early to speculate about how continuing or ending the opium trade will impact terrorism, the Afghan economy, and the war on drugs in Europe and Russia, the two largest markets for opiates.

With so little progress in eradicating the opium trade achieved over the past 10 years, a Special Feature published by Executive is as relevant today as it was in when it was first published in 2011, and it provides key insights into the issue.

https://www.executive-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/SF_afghanistan-heroin-143_LEV_syria-95.pdf
0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
CommentEconomyEntrepreneurshipSpecial Report

E-learning for better job preparedness

by Mona Itani & Yasmeen Kaissi
written by Mona Itani & Yasmeen Kaissi

The shift from traditional to unconventional teaching methods, including online and blended learning, was extremely timely for educational institutions and their teachers as it helped them finally step into the new learning methods of the 21st century. Prompted by the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 lockdown, educational institutions realized the importance of this digital shift so that they are no longer lagging when it comes to adequately preparing the youths with skills that include learning agility and working in teams remotely to name a few. In our fast-paced and everchanging world, rethinking the way we learn is the only way we can keep up with it. As e-learning guru Debadrita Sengupta says: “A quintessential skill in the modern business world is to be able to learn, unlearn, and relearn.” 

Education gear shift

The current pandemic took the world by storm, especially schools who have been fixated on traditional teaching methods for a very long time. While technology has changed a lot of industries drastically and even demolished some, such change has been particularly slow in the educational sector. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Despite the fact that many educational institutions and schools have integrated technology in their teaching methods, conventional and traditional teaching methods were still very much dominant[/inlinetweet]. Face-to-face interactions between students and their teachers have always been deemed essential for effective learning. It is safe to say, however, that the pandemic shifted the whole system and gave schools, teachers, and students no other choice but to adopt remote learning. This shift incentivized the educational sector as a whole to catch up with the rest of the world and ride the wave of digital transformation. Despite the fact that many people criticized this shift for various reasons, we believe that using unconventional teaching methods will do the students good in the longer term. Innovative and blended teaching methods were introduced because of the pandemic but are here to stay after it. Why? Because they offer students a skillset that is otherwise not learnt, the most important of which is being agile. Today, these skills, among many others, can make or break one’s career.

In-roads into 21st century skills 

In order to bridge the gap between the education system and the needs of the new job-market, Riyada for Social Innovation SAL launched Shabab Lab in July 2021, the first social innovation elearning platform in the Arab world. Shabab Lab provides schools and educational institutions with a unique opportunity to complement their efforts to provide a high-quality education through validated and tested hands-on self-paced online programs that integrate technology, entrepreneurship, and the social good in a coherent and seamless way. Designed by professors at the American University of Beirut, the platform has already partnered with prominent international schools in Lebanon and the Arab region. Some of the Lebanese schools which have tested the platform and signed-up for 2021-2022 programs include International College, American Community School, Brummana HighSchool, College des Saints Coeurs Ain Najm, and Rawdah High School. Shabab Lab’s programs provide highschool students with a head-start preparation for the future of jobs as they require them to engage in team-work, design thinking, market research, ideation of solutions to social and environmental problems in their communities, business planning, solution prototyping using a newly learned technology, and pitching. By undergoing these action-based programs, the youths transform into responsible global citizens that help make the world a better place. Through the project-based programs offered in both English and Arabic, students are provided with a life-change experience as they create technology solutions for the social good and become the changemakers that their communities need. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]In addition to schools, many corporations, such as mobile operators, and iNGO’s, such as UNICEF and other United Nations (UN) agencies, are paying more attention to youth empowerment and upskilling as part of their agenda to prepare a skilled pool of talents. [/inlinetweet]Moreover, many governments in the Arab world, especially GCC countries that have outlined their strategic vision and which include innovation and developing the knowledge economy as priority areas, are investing money and resources to provide their youths with similar opportunities to strengthen their entrepreneurial and digital skills and to become responsible and innovative citizens in their countries who can transform challenges into opportunities and flip social frustrations into solutions. 

Schools subscribe to the Shabab Lab platform to provide their students with access to the fullfledged programs that are present on the platform for high-schoolers starting with Grade 10. Through programs titled “Web for Change” for Grade 10 (already on the platform), “AR for Good” for Grade 11 and “AI for Good” for Grade 12 (launching in Fall 2021) students learn to develop new technology that is in demand by the job market. Moreover, they identify a problem under a specific social/environmental theme based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and develop a prototype and a business plan to prove that their project idea to solve this problem is indeed feasible and sustainable. Some of the main outcomes include an enhanced entrepreneurial mindset and a skillset that includes both hard and soft skills such as technology development, teamwork, communication skills, community engagement and business planning. The created pitch decks are assessed by expert jury members where all teams compete in a regional competition over valuable in-kind and monetary awards. So far, over 50 social and environmental projects have been created and pitched through the Shabab Lab platform in 2 editions of the “Web for Change” program with over 180 student participants coming from more than 15 schools. 

In addition to the school offering, Shabab Lab is currently expanding its free content available to anyone who signs up on the platform. This content includes courses on social innovation and design thinking, and in the making is a series of online courses/videos on career orientation, neuroscience and learning, and open innovation to name a few. These courses expose students to areas that are normally emphasized in the curriculum and are being prepared in partnership with world-renowned experts in their domains and will enable Shabab Lab to become the “Coursera for high schoolers in the Arab world.” 

0 comments
3 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
AnalysisEducationEntrepreneurshipSpecial Report

Pure education

by Thomas Schellen
written by Thomas Schellen

Education is the public good that, economically spoken, has the largest implications for development of human capital and wealth. At the same time, the public good of education is rooted in non-economic values that are not amenable to the profit motive. Moreover, this public good is based on human interaction, and ideas such as online college courses, for all their stickiness since the dawn of the collegiate internet, have not displaced the time-honored practices of tertiary education on physical campuses.

Digitized education has at least until last year not transpired into the magnificent revolution of attainment and opportunity that social visionaries have been so fond of in their belief that the educated person will be the better person. But something has changed in the pandemic and infodemic of 2020.

Thus today, education more than ever is among those fields that tech entrepreneurs, and the financiers, analysts, and facilitators of digital economies, love to label as “xyz-tech” (now must one say Fintech or better Techfin?) and hyperventilate about. As the pandemic of 2020 pivoted digital education needs from more efficient classroom tools to the urgent improvement of remote teaching and learning experiences, the previous hyping up of “edutech” startups was boosted to another, bubbly appearing, dimension of both genuine need and investor frenzy. 

Over the past year, this frenzied edutech race was notably demonstrated in the People’s Republic of China, the country with the undisputedly largest (but only in one disputed international ranking the highest achieving) education system. According to studies cited in recent news stories on governmental decisions to reign in wild edutech, well over 80,000 new edutech enterprises were formed in China in 2020, and investors poured the equivalent of $16.3 billion into the sector. This excess inflow of funding further distorted the immense Chinese edutech market. Having been previously nurtured into a $12 billion (2016 figures) online tutoring market by the country’s high-pressure, merit and certification oriented education system, online tutoring ballooned last year to 40 percent out of a $100 plus billion total for-profit tutoring market. 

This commercialization of education provision and families’ hunt for educational credentials for their children grew to a point where the Chinese government this July deployed opinion channels and regulatory means to limit for-profit edutech operations. Witnessing intense for-profit growth through financial investments and edutech startup formations, along with very recent government responses, the country at this moment can serve as example for the edutech boom’s upsides and downsides.

Opportunity from misery

Given the education sector’s and the for-profit online education market’s overriding social and economic importance in combination with the cultural predilection of the Lebanese to invest in their children’s education, it stands to reason that any bit of successful edutech innovation in this country’s entrepreneurship ecosystem can be of exponential economic and social value, an antidote to today’s Lebanese desolation. 

To investigate how the universal fascination with edutech looks in the Lebanese entrepreneurship context in the era after the central bank’s Circular 331 and its boosting of bank-backed ecosystem investments, Executive discussed with three edutech startups. We conversed with Kamkalima, an example of a mature startup which has grown into its own sweet spot by filing very specific classroom needs; eFlow education as example of an impact-investment driven one that focuses on the needs of i-NGOs which are serving marginalized groups and that used the pandemic as its springboard for its first growth spurt; and Catalysis as one that, while in significant ways the fruit of the lockdown and economic malaise of Lebanon, is in this summer of 2021 just beginning its push into what it expects will be a viable niche at the intersection of wellness and education. 

A trend intensified rather than new

The proposition of inventively infusing education with tech entrepreneurship has been appealing to Lebanon’s educative minds from the induction of the entrepreneurship ecosystem in the early 2010s. In any of the seven years until 2019, a demo day wouldn’t have been a typical one if an acceleration program’s graduates didn’t include one or more edutech or school related startups, such as a school management platform, Arabic language teaching, STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) gamification, or some sort of education marketplace concept. 

The founders of these startups often had experience with teaching or tutoring as either providers or recipients. And by the 2020/21 academic year, some of their bets on education already paid off well enough, despite or because of Lebanon’s many problems of late. Synkers, the Beirut based edutech marketplace for tutoring – that has seen increasing popularity with learners prepping themselves for tests such as the SAT as with expat and local tutors – has this summer been acquired by UK-based private schools conglomerate Inspired of Lebanese-British entrepreneur Nadim Nsouli. The marketplace is now, under the new name Ostaz but with unchanged local leadership, aiming for global expansion.

That edutech is today drawing the attention of global school operators and big publishers in the field of education is in itself unsurprising, given that no individual in the knowledge age can evade exposure to education. The value of education is immeasurable, even if the rise of the credentialed and commoditized illusion of earned knowledge in the context of the knowledge economy makes it well worth reiterating time and again that gaining a good education and acquiring a prime university degree are no more necessarily synonymous than the ability to afford a Koenigsegg or Ferrari is with the ability to drive fast gracefully and responsibly. 

What may be astounding to outsiders of the Lebanese cultural mix where hunger for measurable success, and thirst after showing it off, encounters strong educational traditions in the best European sense, is that the three edutech entrepreneurs in Executive’s purview are displaying much more than just profit motives for their engagement with digital transformation of teaching and learning. Each in its different way is addressing a none-too-obvious niche that their founders see themselves as specially qualified and passionate to serve. Moreover, the startups under our examination have been performing quite admirably: they have not only been driven to higher levels of activity by the 2020 pandemic but managed to unearth funding or significant financial opportunity despite the new barriers in access to funding that have railed the Lebanese entrepreneurship ecosystem this year and last. 

Kamkalima

Kamkalima, the mature startup focused on the Arabic classroom, was incorporated in Lebanon in 2015 and in the United Arab Emirates in 2019. Cofounder and chief executive officer Siroun Shamigian tells Executive that after quick initial percentagewise growth during the launch year and an intermediate slackening of nonetheless continued growth thereafter, the year 2020 brought a clean doubling of users, schools that rely on its Arabic teaching and classroom tools. During the spring 2020 phase of the 2019/20 academic year that was affected by coronavirus lockdowns, “we went free for any school in any country. Because of that, we experienced user growth, not financial growth, of more than 100 percent,” she explains. According to her, in the past two years over 4,000 students in Lebanon alone benefited from Kamkalima for free. “In this academic year, which means [the 12 months from] September 2020, we had around 40 percent growth in paying students. For the 2021/22 academic year, we are projecting even higher growth on basis of new partnership agreements, opening of new markets, and because of COVID change impact on mindsets”, Shamigian adds. 

The business concept of Kamkalima is software-as-a-service (SaaS) and business-to-business In collaboration with SPECIAL REPORT 44 executive-magazine.com June – August 2021 Labor education (B2B), meaning that currently only schools and not individual learners are targeted as contract partners. However, the company is preparing new products that will meet demand from individual learners of Arabic and expatriate Arabic-speaking parents who want to teach their children the tongue of their forebears. According to Shamigian, all materials that Kamkalima developed for its content library are not arabized imports but produced as original content by experts from different Arab speaking countries. 

In her experience – which is the experience of an “accidental entrepreneur” whose teaching journey led her to discover and respond to the need for better digital tools in classrooms that teach Arabic – [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]there are significant time savings and improved efficiencies for the Arabic departments of schools that avail themselves of Kamkalima’s four-pronged platform for students, teachers, Arabic department coordinators, and supervisors of school networks.[/inlinetweet] Shamigian cites high renewal rates and far above-average net promoter scores – a measure of customer satisfaction – as evidence. 

This notwithstanding, she notes that the path of selling the platform has been a path of fears and resistance. “As an edutech we are following the path of difficulties, because we sell the concept before selling the platform,” she says, referring to often encountered cultural perception barriers against usage of electronic means in the teaching of Arabic. 

Other fears to overcome originate from general tech weariness. “For teachers to feel comfortable with technology, they have to understand that technology is not their replacement. On the contrary, it is a force to support them and make their job easier while improving student engagement,” she elaborates. 

These conceptual hurdles and the small fact of the prevalence of bureaucracy in school systems act as stronger access barriers in Kamkalima’s field of specialization when compared with other edutech endeavors such as tutoring marketplaces. 

Kamkalima achieved initial funding from own sources, followed by seed funding and then a Series A financing round of $1.5 million led by Lebanese venture capital (VC) fund Phoenician Capital. This round also involved the entrepreneurship ecosystem stalwarts iSME and IM Capital. 

Involving Circular 331 money, the funding from this round became partly inaccessible under the liquidity crunch of late 2019. But the venture was undeterred and Kamkalima is currently preparing for a substitute Series A funding round with engagement of regional investors and VCs, including local ones. 

The new round is projected for completion in first quarter of 2022, and the still unannounced funding target is expected to be in the common range for Series A. The funding will be dedicated to scale the enterprise whose ambitions entail rolling the platform into new geographic and topical markets, adding new products, including one game app teaching letters to younger children, and entering new business and consultancy partnerships. 

Notwithstanding the vision of Kamkalima’s market internationalization by founders Shamigian and Nisrine Makkouk, and the enterprise’s second incorporation in the UAE, the startup is lastingly committed to Lebanon as its operational base. Despite of the serial shocks that the Lebanese economy suffered over the past two years, the enterprise did not lay off any employees but took several new hires into its team of, today, 21 persons, all but two of whom are based in Beirut.

Recalling fondly how Makkouk and herself, two former teachers with no entrepreneurial pedigrees, were emboldened with “big and uncommon” trust by Kamkalima’s launch investors, IM Capital, Shamigian says, [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]“The value of being in Lebanon is the team, plus the investors. Being in Lebanon and having access to Lebanese talent helped us a lot. The crisis will end at one point and we want to be part of the rebuilding.”[/inlinetweet]

eFlow education

The eFlow Education startup of 2020 is a child of serendipity in the midst of chaos, although it defines itself far more dryly as “educational cloud based platform powered by an interactive chatbot that enables learning delivery and management,” before informing site explorers that eFlow conversational course formats can be accessed via common social media platforms. 

The startup was conceptualized by entrepreneurs Bassel Jalaleddine, computer engineer and co-founder of online tech course platform Cherpa Education, and Samer Bawab of mobility app Carpolo’s startup fame. The pair built their solution in response to a request for solving a problem that Near East Foundation (NEF, a non-governmental organization that was founded over a century ago in the US as The American Committee for Syrian and Armenian Relief) had met when it sought to communicate with its beneficiaries through common messaging channels. 

In order to sort out the communication discordance that bothered NEF, the tech entrepreneurs developed a chatbot that would solve the problem. In the process, the enterprising minds came to suspect that the challenge of efficient communication of education content to disparate and technically disadvantaged user groups was not an isolated problem of one international NGO. 

This suspicion turned into a hypothesis of latent NGO demand for a tool that would facilitate communication of educational content to poor children by smartphone. This demand hypothesis was confirmed when temporary school closure responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were first imposed across the region. “When the pandemic struck, the schools and NGOs did not have a remote learning plan for their beneficiaries,” cofounder Bawab tells Executive. 

eFlow’s offer of a solution that allowed providing learners with content via easy-to-access channels that conveyed a familiar user feel, as well as managing their attendance from diverse locations in a well-coordinated way, brought immediate responses as six NGOs signed up to eFlow’s services within the first six months. Even better for the startup, the NGOs’ needs were not just temporary. 

“We saw huge interest when we sent out our marketing messages. However, there was already serious inefficiency in the way NGOs were operating with the refugees and marginalized communities. They were spending enormous amounts of resources – money – on solutions that did not work, or were dispatching field officers to the areas and neighborhoods but could not properly track data. We found a need in this space of humanitarian education and awareness,” Bawab says. 

According to Bawab, NGOs working with students in rural areas during the pandemic initially moved to managing their beneficiaries via WhatsApp groups but this did not go well at a moment when the schools and NGOs did not have a remote learning plan for their beneficiaries. Challenges that the NGOs had to deal with included learners who did not know how to use a laptop computer, or who did not have much internet connectivity, or who otherwise had barriers against environments such as Google classroom. 

“We had to come up with an alternative mobile solutions for [the beneficiaries and NGOs] to still get content and educational materials without spending too much time on training them on using platforms. We took advantage of their familiarity with WhatsApp and sent them materials, saving the NGO time and stress,” Bawab explains. 

eFlow’s user base, which reached 2,000 learners in the first three months of operations, quintupled to 10,000 in the three months to July 2021, he adds. The client base by middle of this year numbers seven NGOs, including Jordan’s Queen Rania Foundation, Mentor Arabia, Relief International, and UNICEF. About half of current users are based in Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq. Beneficiaries also are served in Oman and the United Arab Emirates. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Outside of Arabic-speaking countries, eFlow pilot ventures are running or being set up in Latin America (Mexico, Peru and Costa Rica), as well as Zimbabwe. [/inlinetweet]

Bawab says that the startup, apart from an angel investment of $35,000 for 10 percent of equity, relied on own resources for funding. It to date achieved revenue of $150,000 under its variant of the B2B business model whereby paying client NGOs contract the startup for education projects. Projects are free of charge for learners who also are supported by the respective NGO with the required connectivity and the devices they need to access the educational content. eFlow is enrolled in the Bloom Accelerator program, in which it is a grantee of $10,000, and in terms of accolades last month was among global winners of a Seedstarsmanaged competition called The Migration Entrepreneurship Prize. 

The both socially and educationally tinged startup has been admitted to the portfolio of impact investment fund Village Capital and is slated to receive $100,000 worth of IT tools and support on basis of Village Capital’s partnership with IBM. eFlow is currently undertaking preparations for a pre-Series A funding appeal looking for $500,000 to $1 million, the exact timeline of which has not yet been determined. Funding in the round would be sought from a strategic investor or from a VC fund with educational focus and expertise. 

The company did not try to register legally in Lebanon as first step but went straight to Dubai. Its incorporation there, however, did not change the startup’s existential anchoring in Beirut. According to Bawab, the team – currently 12 full-timers – is based in Beirut, and planned hires should expand this team to more than 20 and possibly as many as 30 by the first quarter of next year. 

The skillsets that the company is looking for in new hires range from web developers to content designers and sales experts. Its operational focus in the second half of this year is to acquire more clients, get more users, and more use cases, Bawab says. Prospects that the startup is also seeking to explore include the corporate social responsibility market. “Corporate training is another big opportunity for us but for now we are focusing on marginalized communities, refugees – people that may live in camps or may face trauma from war and migration,” he adds. In its longer journey, he envisions the Lebanese startup as entity that could be acquired by a big name in international educational publishing or even a communications giant, be integrated into a leading international educational NGO, or become a tech department of UNICEF. 

Catalysis

Equally far from credentialism and base profit motives as the two previously described edutech startups is Catalysis, the brainchild of budding entrepreneur Lara Shabb. Shabb, who appears to have no difficulty impressing not only her colleagues but even faint acquaintances with natural, entrepreneurial dynamism, shifted from the path of an employee to being a hopeful edutech entrepreneur as the Lebanese crisis unfolded. (Full disclosure: she accepted a short engagement as Executive’s managing editor in fall of 2020, and worked with the magazine for several months). 

Combining her expertise in digital communication tools with her personal dedication to wellness and spiritual growth, she designed her startup as “a marriage of e-learning and social competence,” which she aspires to realize as nexus of wellness and education. “Our niche is wellness, everything related to fitness, mindset, coaching, meditation, and the product we are building is positioned to meet needs not fully served by either of two verticals,” Shabb says.

In her view, domineering social platforms of the Facebook kind understand the paradigm of community but are void of values whereas teaching platforms such as leading educational content aggregator Mindvalley – the personal growth and wellbeing focused platform’s course offering includes diverse teachings of everything from spiritual evolution to body transformation, from conscious parenting to millennial entrepreneurship – are void of community, besides being stuffed with lengthy, and expensive to produce, video presentations. 

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]To differentiate her wellness education hybrid, Shabb aims to administer “bite-sized” wisdom videos that will be consumed on the smartphone and also can be produced with a minimum of specialized audio tools and everyone’s essential digital device. [/inlinetweet]“We encourage using iPhone and headphones when filming”, she says, and enthuses, “Many teachers have much to share but cannot compete at that level, so the home smartphone clip is the answer of Catalysis. We are building in the space where you get the best of the platform world and the best of the education content world.” 

She concedes that the startup is still tweaking its minimum viable product, which is due to be completed in short order, and revealed to the virtual world as the Catalysis platform before the fourth quarter of 2021. 

In financing terms, her venture has benefited from a tech grant under the umbrella of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Owing to this grant, the engineering of the site is taken care of and being implemented by a team of fresh engineers from Zahle who are working on this project under the mentorship and supervision of expert computer engineers. Shabb describes the engineering cost of Catalysis, which is currently in beta testing, as the startup’s biggest expense – worth between $50,000 and $100,000 to the startup and covered by the recent tech grant that was awarded to the project under USAID. 

The only expenditure of own funds was to cover the cost of establishing the brand. According to Shabb, bootstrapping and volunteer efforts by her handpicked project collaborators accounted for most of the non-engineering work that has been invested since the startup’s ideation at the beginning of this year. The worsening depreciation of the Lebanese lira was the drop that made her creative reservoir overflow into startup action. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]“The idea was to allow teachers to put online what they already know in order to create a passive income stream in dollars. [This was] because I run a wellness course and saw that all of my companions were basically making nothing for the work they were doing. [/inlinetweet]This work is really needed, coaching, energy healing, sound healing”, she says. 

She adds that about 50 handpicked teachers have signed upon her project, including relatively unknown but highly knowledgeable practitioners who also have day jobs besides their chosen callings and educational roles, along with a small selection of better known instructors and some that are international stars in their fields. However, any individual registering on her site will not be classified as “teacher” or “student” but as member of the community. Shabb envisions that teachers will bring their micro-followings to the site and help expand its reach organically. 

Members who upload videos will retain their intellectual property (IP) over their contributions and will be able to seek monetization under two different formulas. According to Shabb, all content will have to comply with Catalysis’ objective for “abundance, community, and service,” and content that the site administrators deem to be of insufficient value vis-à-vis these requirements, is liable for being flagged and removed.

On top of the satisfaction of owning their IP, content providers to the site can classify their video clips as free offerings, premium, or attach a course fee or bundle fee. This corresponds to the Catalysis business model, which foresees offering free access to entry level users in combination with subscription based and fee-based access on the higher content levels. Teachers uploading premium content will receive shares of subscription income as far as applicable and on the highest content level Catalysis will take a cut, projected at 10 percent, of the fees that teachers charge for their top offerings. Pricing power will be the privilege of each teacher, with the market expected to regulate pricing via supply and demand. 

In this sense, the business model of Catalysis appears to be more peer-to-peer marketplace than business-to-consumer (B2C). Committed to lean enterprise principles, the startup will initially focus on the MENA region as its addressable market. Transactions will be dollar-based (with eventual options for teachers to charge their Lebanese adherents in local currency at the rate they choose). 

Shabb does not plan for any big and costly marketing campaigns. The longer term vision for the venture is facilitating wellness education, achieving educational influence, and solving the problems of independent teachers – inclusive of solutions such as payment gateways – who crave to embellish their educational influence but may lack tech skills and marketing knowledge. A second correlated power of Catalysis will be organizing wellness conferences and events, beyond which it is Shabb’s dream to penetrate the corporate market and generate rapid transformations there, fulfilling the promise of Catalysis.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
BusinessEducationLeaders

Virtue out of necessity

by Executive Editors
written by Executive Editors

The convergence of developmental strands – say the convergence of technology, business, medicine, and culture – is a tide that waits for no woman in Lebanon. The simple logic that demands of Lebanese to prepare for the future even in the midst of an epochal disaster is that the race to the future is progressing globally even as the world’s attention in the summer of 2021 has been preoccupied with downside trends such as terrorism, aggressive political fundamentalism, and war risk. 

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Education and entrepreneurship are perennially and rightly touted as Lebanese predilections[/inlinetweet]. Actually, humans of any culture appear predisposed to seek knowledge and pursue enterprise with different degrees of intensity that are determined both individually and on the level of group and civilization. Work is a universal human need, and more so than ever in the age of digitization, automation, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things.

Convergences of global importance will also not be deterred by climate risk and other “green swans,” or predictable global calamities where only the day and magnitude of the next catastrophe are uncertain. One convergence of great interest for Lebanon’s future is the changing and intensifying interconnectedness of education, entrepreneurship, and human work. 

Considering what we humans know and aspire to today, [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]the future of work and entrepreneurship and education from the 2021 vantage point looks like one that will include convergences of digital, virtual, social, and human creativity components[/inlinetweet]. If enlightened and responsible capitalism proves to be a sustainable trend that continues similarly to the trend that has led from the industrial to the knowledge economies, humanity will see further reductions of the barriers between work and play, entrepreneurship and economically meaningful education, purpose of the whole and individual interest.

Among the helpful outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic and the unending chain of coronavirus scares that have traveled the world in the past 19 months (and counting) was to alert the world to the imbalances between overpaid extractive financial work done by the top crop of credentialed graduates on one hand and frontline service jobs and humanitarian work on the other. 

In slightly simpler terms, the importance of jobs from driving buses to supporting the infirm and sweeping the streets, and the dignity and worth of the people who do them, has been illuminated and highlighted relative to the importance of those who juggle numbers and ratios, words and phrases, or cast memes by any other art.  

Reconsiderations under a digital filter

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Education and labor training in the emergent digital age appear to be closer aligned than in many ages[/inlinetweet], perhaps as integrated as in the times when parents were the main conveyor of simple trades like hunting, farming, carpentry, building, etc., to their offspring, usually in the socially prescribed form of father-son transmission of skills, experiences, and rituals.

While this simple mold has been unsuited for the complexity of lives from the early industrial ages onward, the question if we work to live or live to work has been a false dichotomy of industrial and post-industrial economies. The contradiction was imposed on man because of badly judged and wrongly assessed externalities and oppressive behaviors, including (usually male) human managerial behaviors and exploitative attitudes of the industrial capitalist ages. In the digital age, neither externalities nor oppressive behaviors can by any rational expectation be erased from the human race, but they might diminish. 

But with all convergence of entrepreneurship and productive education in a context of meaningful work, there always will be the necessity to develop higher balances. On one side of the scale of education, good impulses of playful learning and universality of knowledge today fulfill an age-old dream of empowering people to seek a life of opportunities through better education. On the other side of the scale, challenges pile up: knowledge is not the key for a good life and mature behavior. 

Commodification of knowledge raises the question if there is too much of it, if a whole society can be impaired by too much information (TMI) and knowledge over-accumulation, more detrimental than obesity from habitual overeating. Education plays a huge role in the observation that societies have over the past 50 years become increasingly trapped in dichotomies of winners and losers where over-dependence on the ideology and rhetoric of rising has paved the road to the tyranny of merit, American thinker Michael Sandel tells us. 

Scratching the surface of great ambitions

All this goes beyond the scope of a simple magazine, print or online. It is a no-brainer that Executive can only scratch at the links between entrepreneurship, education, work, and public goods in the Lebanese society at a moment when work is scarcer than ever, education is a luxury that gets unaffordable, and entrepreneurship is besieged by erosion of critical hard and soft infrastructures. 

Not to mention public goods. Public goods have been eviscerated in corruption and self-interest from the level of the government minister and politician in power to the every-man hoarders or gasoline and medicines.   

All troubles of Lebanon and inequities of our magazine notwithstanding, Executive has researched the relationship of entrepreneurship, education, and labor in this issue and found laudable initiatives. And for being highly commendable, it does not matter if all these initiatives in the adjacent fields of labor education and entrepreneurship will be successful (discussing the likelihood is moot), or created under the entrepreneurial dictate of trying to do something, anything productive at all, in the middle of the worst economic draught of history in order to be prepared for a better future. 

Undertaking our – impeded by circumstances – research into these subjects of entrepreneurship and labor education, we have taken to heart the underlying thought which Jerome, the patron saint of translators, has penned in late antiquity and which just might be the definition of true resilience: facis de necessitate virtutem (you make a virtue of necessity). This meme can be expressed in many idioms. A German proverb calls it Aus der Not eine Tugend machen. Colloquial American might call it making lemonade when being handed lemons. For the online reality, one could describe it as looking for the meaning of friendship on Facebook, or using this generation’s widespread addiction to social media to make people receive a constructive moral message. It all is the same: turn something bad into something good. 

This means [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Lebanon, for improving its preparedness for the dawning age of digital equity, ought to invest in unceasing efforts to rewrite the national relationship of entrepreneurship, technology, education, and work[/inlinetweet]. Or, in an adaptation of Sandel, now is the right time to agree and act upon the insight that “to renew the dignity of wok, we must repair the social bonds the age of merit has undone.”

There is one final aspect to all possible futures that matters perhaps more than even the quality or the ease of education, the usefulness of what we learn for our work lives and careers, and the fact that learning is the opposite of credentialism: the question of character and heart. 

In Lebanon today, this character question compels itself as proposition of total disgust with the system and its private and public institutions and entities. Can one invest herself or himself into a country that is perceived to be a total turn-off by its citizens of all ages, hedonic orientations, personal beliefs and organized faiths?

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Education that is better integrated with entrepreneurship and work, has immense benefits[/inlinetweet]. However, up to now neither the dissemination of more knowledge and labor education nor the successful pursuits of tech entrepreneurs have brought Lebanon inclusiveness and tolerance in such a self-perpetuating cycle where tolerance promotes inclusiveness and inclusiveness enhances tolerance. The country is yet plagued with juxtaposed and equally corruptible concepts of rule by ambiguous technocrats versus rule by self-proclaimed populists. As a sage of the knowledge age once said, we should set the center of our character not in a truth but in the heart.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Brand Voice

BUSINESS PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN LOYALTY BROKERS AND NASCO LEBANON

by Nasco & Loyalty Investment & Insurance
written by Nasco & Loyalty Investment & Insurance

Mr. Gino Nader and Mr. Abraham Karabajakian are pleased to announce to their clients, employees and stakeholders the signing of the new Business Partnership between Nasco Lebanon and Loyalty Brokers.

At a time when our country needs consolidation as a base for revival among so many other things, we view this “Business Partnership” as an example of how to set considerations of ego and prestige aside and make room for common sense initiatives that privilege cooperation.

We are confident that our Business Partnership will provide our clients with an even higher level of service and a better all-round professional experience. But we also view this alliance as a precedent and example for other brokers who might find that their interests and those of their clients are best served in this way. 

Under the Business Partnership agreement, Loyalty Brokers and Nasco Lebanon will join forces and build on the synergies made possible by the combined weights of their insurance portfolios, the complementary capabilities of their teams and the harmony that proceeds from their convergent professional values, business culture and principles. 

With the managerial talents of MM. Khalil Tawil and Rabih Kanaan at the helm, we feel confident that Nasco and Loyalty clients will be in the best of hands.

Beyond Lebanon’s borders, the Business Partnership will allow Loyalty to leverage Nasco’s presence in its different territories in a win-win alliance of talent, will and enterprise.

Gino Nader and Abraham Karabajakian 

0 comments
2 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail