Loading ...Meet The 23-Year-Old Bringing Entrepreneurship To High Schoolers In The Middle East
By: Sophia Jennings
Source: HuffPost
As president of Al Tareeq, Aboudi Qattan doesn’t really do things half-ass. In the ninety minutes we spent together in Los Angeles, he ordered his first chlorophyll water, took a selfie at Paul Smith and spoke Spanish with an intern from Mexico City. This, apparently, is normal behavior. “He can talk to anyone,” his friend Feisel tells me, watching Aboudi make our waitress laugh (this time, in French).
Palestinian but raised between Houston and London, Aboudi is in town to talk about his company Al Tareeq, an organization that teaches entrepreneurship courses to teens in Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.
As a business, Al-Tareeq is two-fold: teach private school kids in Amman and Beirut, then take the funds and teach students in the nearby refugee camps. Their first trial was last summer in the Zarqa Camps There, Aboudi, his co-founder Hamza Bilbeisi, and two teachers from Fikra3al Mashi taught their two week course to twenty students.
“We focused on how students could look around and start something that was not only going to benefit their community but generate a source of income,” Aboudi explains. While one student proposed a neighborhood soccer league, another girl developed a plan to make use of the men she saw sitting around and the services needed in the camp: cleaning, car washing, etc. “She figured out a way to make the men useful,” Aboudi laughs.
Within their classroom of twenty, twelve were girls. “I won’t teach a class unless it’s fifty percent girls,” Aboudi says. “Al Tareeq is all about equal opportunity.”
A recent graduate of Babson College, Aboudi’s company began at the university, where students are required to propose a business in their first year. “Al Tareeq wouldn’t have started without teachers and kids giving me ideas and feedback,” he explains, mentioning Hamza as well as Freddy Rading, now a Brand Specialist at Amazon. While Freddy wanted to work on a social impact project, Aboudi wanted to continue the work of his father and grandfather, one who founded Paces and the other, The Qattan Foundation.
After three months of brainstorming, Aboudi and Hamza met Rami Rustom, a freshman at MIT and the founder of Fikra 3al Mashi. Shortly after, Aboudi left Boston to study at HEC Paris where he developed a curriculum mixing his Babson courses with what he was learning in France.
For next summer, Al Tareeq plans to run three-hour “Coding & Entrepreneurship” classes in Beirut, half the time spent on the lesson and the other half on a guest lecturer, field trip or open work session. These classes will be led by Salam Al-Nukta and Eyad Khayat, two Syrian refugees, TedXYouth speakers and founders of the Changemakers organization.
As well, after teaching in temporary classrooms donated by the International Medical Corps, Al Tareeq is looking to design their own space. “We don’t want walls on the desk between kids,” Aboudi explains. “We want a space where kids can go, walk around, and talk to each other. It’s all about collaboration.” In the morning, Rami will teach their refugee students in Arabic and in the afternoon Aboudi will teach their private school students in English.
In preparing for their courses, one of the team’s biggest challenges is convincing parents that entrepreneurship is a worthy area of study. “There’s a stigma in Arab culture where failure is not accepted,” Aboudi admits. His solution is to connect students to local VCs for future internships and incubators to insure long term growth of their companies. “Most of our speakers will be successful entrepreneurs in Jordan and Lebanon,” he says. “They’re interested in keeping in touch and developing relationships with our students.”
Aboudi’s also adamant that their organization maintain an active network of entrepreneurs long after the students graduate their courses. They’ll do this through their new website, where students will blog, read about local businesses and message each other long after the programs end. “Our idea is just having these kids connected at all times,” Aboudi explains. In ten years, Aboudi sees an empire of alums who’ve gone through the Al Tareeq curriculum and contribute more to their local economies than he could have with one business.
“I want to show these kids that they don’t need to be Mark Zuckerberg,” Aboudi says. “Entrepreneurship isn’t just about starting a business. Entrepreneurship is about networking, having confidence in yourself, and really exploring the resources you have around you.”