Al-Tareeq - The Path

About one year ago, I was having a conversation with Freddy Rading and Hamza Bilbeisi about how we could impact the lives of Middle Eastern students using our resources at Babson College. We all knew we wanted to make an impact but struggled to agree on how we could use entrepreneurship to do just that.

Here I am a year later, extremely grateful and excited to say we have successfully completed our pilot Al-Tareeq entrepreneurship program teaching Syrian refugees- with the help of Rami Rustom and Sari Samakie at Fikra 3al Mashi. Together for nine days we travelled to the International Medical Corps education center in Zarqa, Jordan to teach our students how they could apply their passions to business ventures and how they could be a support group for each other in times of turmoil. Our students identified problems in their communities, worked in teams to develop business plans, and presented final projects to us at the end of the course. We even partially funded the best two ideas (albeit a small amount) and will keep tabs to see how these ventures turn out. It has been such an incredible experience, and we hope this is only the start for Al-Tareeq.

              Today marked the end of our first program and while we leave feeling proud of what we’ve done, we are also sad to say bye to our class of 2016. There were definitely both ups and downs, and at times I realized just how hard it is to be a teacher. But at the same time, this experience was rewarding and it motivated us to start preparing in advance for next year.

We’re registering as a social enterprise so we will be able to operate as a regular business and offer our programs to private schools across the Middle East, so that we can be a sustainable business. We will also keep working with refugees by continuing our partnership with Fikra 3al Mashi and using the revenue from aforementioned projects to fund projects for refugees, ensuring that they never have to pay for our services. While our high school programs will cover entrepreneurship and business skills, all refugee projects will cover researching skills before introducing basic entrepreneurship concepts.

              As a result of our first program running successfully, we’ve already made contact with three private schools in Amman, Jordan that are interested in our services for next summer. Our next steps are to register as a legal entity, draft out our full business plan, and begin to raise seed funding. We also hope to have our own location for next summer, as we think we would benefit greatly from having our own space in which to hold lessons.  We want to thank everybody who has helped us get to this point so far because what has helped us grow so much has been the feedback we’ve received from all of our peers.