Last month, I was part of a team that traveled to Washington, D.C. and met with officials from the US administration. I learnt that President Barack Obama is holding an ‘entrepreneurship in Muslim communities summit’ next March in the US capital about an emerging phenomenon known as social entrepreneurship. A social entrepreneur is, according to Wikipedia, a person who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create and manage a venture to make social change. I had never heard of this concept prior to that visit, or so I thought. It turns out that the founder of one of the most popular forms of social entrepreneurship is the Nobel Laureate Mohammed Younis, who developed the practice of micro-finance in 1976.
Microfinance allows low-income individuals, who were previously outside the traditional banking and finance sector radar screens, to have access not only to small amounts of funding, but also to insurance, transfer and savings.’ These funds can be as low as a few score dollars and are usually requested by individuals who do not want charity but need funding to start a business and get a head start in life. But the hard work will start once they have been given that funding. It can be a good idea to gain some knowledge on such things as accounting manupulators. To make sure that they protect this funding, and any income they receive once their business has been established, looking for accounting services, like those you can find at Pherrus, (https://www.pherrus.com.au/) could be a great resource for business owners to utilize to ensure they can give themselves the best head start in the world of work. By the time Younis won the Nobel Prize in 2006, Grameen bank had almost seven million borrowers – 97 percent of whom were women.
Younis’s work has lifted microfinance into the limelight the world over. Similar concepts are now used in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But I wondered if such an idea could work in the oil-rich Gulf states.
First, it may be unfair to place all the Gull States in the same basket with regards to the need for microfinance. After all, there are glaring differences between a demographically rich country like Saudi Arabia and a small but extremely wealthy state like Qatar. Although Saudi Arabia is much wealthier than Qatar overall, the latter enjoys the second highest GDP income per capita in the world and its citizens may not be in dire need for three-and four-dollar digit loads.
The Gulf States can be roughly split into two groups. The first contains the three wealthier states in terms of GDP income per capita: Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE.
The second group comprises the three relatively less wealthy states in terms of GDP per capita: Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia. These states have a significant lower income portion of the population that might benefit from this growing industry.
In fact, micro-finance is very much alive and kicking in the Gull today. In 2007, the Gulf’s first dedicated micro-finance firm was established when Abdul Latif Jameel Group’s subsidiary, Bab Riq Jameel, teamed up with Younis’ Grameen Foundation to create Grameen-Jameel. The institution’s mandate was wider than its home base of Saudi Arabia and extended to North Africa, the Levant and Yemen. By April 2009, Grameen-Jameel reported that it had already broke red more than US$ 44 million through a Guarantee Fund in micro financing transactions in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Tunisia.
Egypt, the most populated Arab country, saw the establishment by the Egyptian Gulf Bank of a US$ 8 million (EGP 46 million) micro-finance firm that is envisioned to provide about EGP 400 million credit facilities by offering loans from EGP 4000 to EGP 35,000 via its planned 300 country-wide network.
The truth is that in order for this industry to flourish in the Gulf and the Arab world, the regional economic regulators must reform their laws to make it possible for small businesses to be established from homes and bring down licensing costs. It will not make sense to encourage micro financing that involves extending a few hundred or thousand dollars to aspiring youth and then burden them with a series of debilitating fees, charges and hidden costs.
According to the United Nations Development Programme, the Arab world needs to create 50 million new jobs by 2020 to accommodate its young and growing population’ The government sector, which is a major employer in the region, will not be able to accommodate all the new job market entrants and it is time for the regional governments, including those in the Gull, to think outside the box. Even wealthier states like Kuwait and Qatar can chip in and create micro-finance funds for other Arab states’ citizens. The private sector in the region can also start extending loans either directly or by creating micro-finance websites and portals.
Creative, widespread and pragmatic entrepreneurship is the only way for Arab countries to be able to provide work for tens of millions of young Arabs. Micro-finance must be utilized as part of a spectrum of tools, including economic reform and reduce startup cost reduction. Only then will the region be able to provide jobs to our youth.
This article originally appeared in the December 2009 issue of MONEYworks. (PDF Download)