Female Entrepreneurs in the Arab World

So I realized that I’ve written a lot about the food, tourist sights, and taxi rides so far in my blog, but haven’t actually talked about the reason why I’m in Tunisia – for my internship at CAWTAR.



The Center for Arab Women Training and Research, CAWTAR, is the main research center in the region dedicated to issuing reports about the political, social, and economic situation of Arab women. It’s really legit, frequently partnering with the UNDP, UN-INSTRAW, Oxfam, the Islamic Bank, and the World Bank.

My project:
I’m currently working on a report that assesses the situation of female entrepreneurs and identifies areas of improvement in seven Arab countries – United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Tunisia, The Occupied Territories of Palestine, and Algeria. For each country I’m creating a profile where I analyze the relationship between female entrepreneurs and current national research, government policies, cultural norms, legal environment, businesswomen’s networks, access to training, and access to credit.

“That much be a really short report”
That’s how a friend responded when I told them about my project, thinking that female entrepreneurs don’t really exist in the Arab world. Let me tell you, they definitely do. (As confirmed by my projected 120 page report) And I’m definitely learning a lot in the process.

Combating the stereotypes
So it’s true that female entrepreneurship is less common in the Middle East and North Africa than in other developing regions … but here are some things I’ve been learning.

* Not just microfinance: The widely held perception is that the few female entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa region are mainly in the informal or formal micro sector (employing fewer than 10 workers), producing less sophisticated goods and services. This perception is wrong. Of the formal-sector female-owned firms surveyed, only 8% are micro firms More than 30% are very large firms employing more than 250 workers.

* Annual Earnings: These firms are successful. For example in the United Arab Emirates, female-owned businesses faired considerably better than those in the US in 2007. 33% of the Emirate companies surveyed earning annual revenues of more than US$100,000, compared to only 13% of women-owned businesses in the US in the same year.

* Global Competitiveness: Female-owned firms are also active exporters, and a high share attract foreign investors and are heavy users of information technology—all key ingredients for global competitiveness. Female owned firms higher more women, and tend to promote women to higher managerial levels.

* Role Models: Women have fairly strong economic rights under the Islamic shari'a. In fact, many cite Khadijah, the Prophet’s first wife as an example of a wealthy and successful buinesswomen. Ibn Sa’d (8:9) describes her as a “woman of honor and power, and a hirer of men.”


Some Profiles :




Mona Almoayyed was recently listed as one of the top five most influential people in the Gulf Region. She was the first woman in Bahrain elected to the Chamber of Commerce and is the president of The Bahrain Businesswomen’s Society. She is the managing director o f Almoayyed & Sons, a business that sells, distributes, and services leading brands in sectors ranging from automobiles and electronics to office furniture and real estate. Her company currently employees over 2,000 workers.




Salma Hareb was listed first in Forbes Arabia top 50 most powerful Arab businesswomen. She is chief executive of Dubai's Economic Zones World and Jebel Ali Free Zone Authority. Her responsibilities include Jebel Ali Free Zone Authority's (Jafza) global operations, overseeing Techno Park and Dubai Auto Zone and being a member of the boards of the Dubai Export Development Corporation and Forsa, a group that encourages female entrepreneurs.




The barriers:
So given female entrepreneurs have a pretty great track record, why is the female labour force participation and number of female business owners so low? Of course its complicated, but these seem to be themes in my research.

Legal environment: While the legal environment is generally fairly favorable to women within the economic sphere, the legal environments outside the economic sphere may create barriers for female entrepreneurs. For example, women’s freedom of movement based may be limited based on work hours, plane travel, or driving. Also, social laws, such as personal status codes, may reinforce social roles that confirm men as the breadwinner and primary worker.

Access to Credit: Many businesswomen have cited that they have difficulty obtaining credit for a variety of reasons. These include disproportionally inheritance rights, discriminatory treatment at banks, and lack of education about credit sources. Many governments and non-government actors have focused attention toward microfinance to meet the need of female entrepreneurs. While expanding credit access for microenterprise is important, it is not sufficient to simply encourage women to participate in the informal economy. To highlight the full economic potential of women, training must be available to encourage the transition from the informal to the formal economy, to participate in lucrative export and import markets, and to be leaders in traditionally "male-dominated" sectors, like technology and natural resources.

Social norms: Social norms may help and hinder female entrepreneurs. For example, female entrepreneurs often cite that family connections may be a great source of support and that they have great ease managing other female employees. At the same time, gender social norms (ie that the primary role of the man is to be a breadwinner and the woman is to be a mother) are very strong and may limit female business women in a number of ways. For example, a survey of the unemployment rates demonstrates that women make up the majority of the unemployed workforce, even though they are not a large portion of the overall workforce, demonstrating that preference is given to men when jobs are short.


The optimism:

Many countries in the Middle East and North Africa have embraced the importance of encouraging female entrepreneurs. Female entrepreneur awards, TV channels, international conferences, policy reports, and business associations continue to multiple in number.

A BBC news report states that ”Arab women swathed in black Abayas are often perceived in the West as victims of oppression…But, "Now it is very politically correct to address women's issues," says Haifa Fahoum Al Kaylani, chair of the Arab International Women's Forum in London. "It is like a competition between Arab governments to encourage women to enter business and the political process.” Many policy makers have realized that more female entrepreneurs are needed in MENA to help diversify the economy and create 54 million jobs for an estimated 174 million-strong work force by 2030.

My research has convinced me that supporting female entrepreneurs is a powerful avenue to enhance the status of women and contribute to economic growth in the Arab world.

My Tunisian Home

This is my room in Tunisia. Its really simple, just a mattress on the floor and a place for my clothes. Of course, its much messier now than when I took this photo.





This is the view from my window.




As you can see, it's absolutely gorgeous at night. And its the perfect temperature to leave the window open when I sleep at night to let the breeze in.




This is one of my favorite parts of the house, the bookshelf. Most of the books are in french and arabic.
Two of the books that I'm attempting to read are:

"La Pensée Musulmane Moderne" (Modern Islamic Thought)
"Le Don" de Toni Morrison (A french translation of one of Toni Morrison's books ... I'm trying, its a bit of a struggle)




My Tunisian mom taught me how to make couscous. This was my first attempt. You cut up a ton of vegetables, dump in some uncooked couscous, add some garlic, drizzle in some olive oil (the Tunisians love olive oil) and then mix it all up with your hands. Its pretty messy.

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Then you put it on the stove for an hour, the couscous cooks, and voila, my lunch for the entire week at work. I love Tunisian food. (more pictures to come!)

My Experience in a Tunisian Taxi: Frarabic, Facebook, and Will.i.am

Taxi rides are by far one of the most adventurous parts of my day. Today was no exception.

As a bit of background: driving rules are quite different in Tunisia. Thanks to the French, the preferred method of roads intersecting is in a “rond-point,” where all the roads feed into a circule and cars in the middle of the circle fight to get out and cars in incoming streets fight to get in. Unlike clearly articulated right of way rules in the US, the rule here seems to be “go – and whoever gets there first has the right of way”

So after work yesterday, I took a taxi back home, like always. The driver was young, probably about 25, and had American hip hop music playing on the radio. Now most taxi drivers are daring, but it was clear when he made a U turn into oncoming traffic to pick me up on the other side of the street that he was particularly daring. He started talking to me when I got in the car, but I couldn’t really understand – which I initially blamed on my poor French skills. The North African French accent is much different than the Parisian French I learned in school, so it takes me a few minutes to adjust.

Even though I wasn’t responding, my driver kept talking. Gesturing at his mouth with his hands and every so often laughing hysterically. For about every French word, he was saying five Arabic words. True frarabic. It was clear I didn’t understand. (Generally if I’m not talking at this point taxi drivers see a confused look on my face, stop talking, and the ride continues in silence. Not this taxi driver.) He really wanted me to understand something. So, as we are driving in the highway, zipping in between the other cars, frequently crossing the median and driving head-on into oncoming traffic so we can pass other cars, and my taxi driver decides that increasing the volume of his voice and gesturing wildly will help me understand Arabic. Oncoming traffic is changing lanes so we don’t hit them, and I’m not understanding any better.

My taxi driver finally sees that I’m not getting it. So as we are soaring down the highway at 60 miles an hour he decides to call his friend and proceeds to yelling something in Arabic over the phone, pass the phone to me as I try and listen to his friend shout in French, all the time looking at me more than the road and driving with one hand. But I can’t understand his friend. Its windy, its noisy, people are honking at us (rightfully so). I try and tell him to hang up the phone, but he’s still yelling in Arabic and holding the phone by my ear. Then, I hear a word I understand.

Facebook. My taxi driver has endangered my life because he wants to facebook friend me. Seriously.

Hoping that the madness will stop, I get out a piece of paper, write out my name, and hand it to my taxi driver. He smiles and says facebook along with a lot of Arab words.

I’m safe. Or so I think. In relief, I nod my head a little bit to the beat of the song that has just come on the radio, the new “O.M.G” by Will.I.am and Usher. My taxi driver sees me, nods, and then proceeds to release the break to the beat of the music as we head into the intersection, one of the biggest rond-ponts in Tunis. The next three minutes we are jolting back and forth across the road to the beat of Usher.

I finally got home. The whole trip took about 20 minutes, twice as long as normal (we definitely missed a turn somewhere).

But who knows, maybe Ill have a new facebook friend tonight?

“Development, if not engendered, is endangered”

It’s a catchy quote, taken from a UN development report published a decade and a half ago. And it essentially sums up my academic interest, and the philosophy of CAWTAR, my summer employer in Tunisia.

The UNDP report elaborates that “neglecting the gender dimensions of poverty seriously undermines effects to achieve sustainable human development.” When this report was written in 1995, around the time of the 4th Bejing Conference, the idea was infectious, reshaping international development agencies, models of statistical data collection, and long term strategic government plans.

“Women, the World’s Greatest Untapped Resource”

That’s the slogan on billboards in the Tunis airport of a prominent development group that focuses on women’s issues. Their claim seems to be generally widely supported in academic literature.

Improving the condition of women has large and sustainable returns.

Returns in the financial sense, since encouraging women to work in the formal sector certainly increases the available labor force. But perhaps even more discussed, microeconomic studies have demonstrated that households models are not unitary -- women and men invest resources differently. When women have increased or independent control over financial resources, the health, educational level, and general wellbeing of children in the household improves. In addition, many researchers claim that women are more financially trustworthy, work harder, and make better investment decisions. Combine these results with the idea that gender equality is the sign of any modern and civilized society (a concept we ironically proclaim the in US), gender equality in development has attracted international attention, and money.





You don’t have to look far (the Millennium Development Goals, for example, or UNIFEM, as pictured above) to see that gender equality has taken center stage. But a closer look reveals that gender quality coming in vogue has been accompanied by a great debate. In addition to questions of what “achieving gender equality” or “empowering women” actually means (more on this in a later post), some women’s groups, both locally based an internationally have questioned whether current practices of development through globalization have actually achieved these ends.

McDonalization – helpful or harmful?

The first report I read at my internship, the Arab Women’s Development Report 2001, explained that the benefits of global restructuring are to date “unequally distributed.” It furthers by explained “far from reducing international migration flows by moving products instead of people, globalization’s “movers” have become its “losers.” This fairly evident in many countries where benefits of globalization have accumulated with the owners of multinational corporations where the backbone of the labor force – often previously part time or migrant workers – receive almost no compensation for their work. You don't have to look far to see pictures and hear stories of women and children in horrible working conditions in sweatshops in developing countries. It’s not a universal trend, but it’s certainly visible.

So to be honest, there isn’t really a conclusion to this post right now, although I certainly have more thoughts. And I certainly want to explore the entanglement, for better or worse, of globalization and development through my internship.

As I read back on this post, it sounds a little bit snarky. That’s purposeful. I want to clarify that I whole-heartedly agree that engendering development is essential to make a positive impact. At the same time, gender issues in development are complicated, often more so than presented in the media, and real sustainable approach to development requires a critical examination of our current models, and a healthy dose of skepticism about Westernization.

For those of you that are interested in learning more, I highly recommend:

“Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn"

“Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East by Isobel Coleman”


This post was written by the request of Lindsay. Let me know if you have any posting requests and Ill do my best to muse about them :)

My Tunisian Mother...

... is one of the most amazing people I have ever met in my life. She's a strong, independent, single, adventurous, feminist, atheist, race-sensitive, NGO-supporting, fine-arts loving, Arab woman. And proud of it.

"Sois-toi meme" (Be yourself). It's one of the first things she tells me. We are driving back from the airport while she is explaining to me that I shouldn't worry about adapting to Tunisian culture. What's more important, she says, is that you are yourself. "For example," she recounts, "I love to travel. But I wont travel to Saudi Arabia. They make women covered themselves there - totalement. I dont wear la voile (the veil), it's like a prison."

I'm a little surprised. And definitely intrigued.

Where to begin to describe Mab, my Tunisian mother? She's certainly a product of the 60s/70s women movement in Tunisian, similar in some respects to the hippie/female empowerment trends in the US. She lives in a small flat outside of the capital. It's a simple apartment, without very much furniture but decorated with rugs and paintings from her various travels. An interior designer in the US would say everything clashes, but I love her house because its like snippets of story from her various travels around Africa. "Je vive tres simple" (I live very simply), she tells me, as if she has too much to do in life to be worried about accumulating furniture that collects dust.




Technically she lives alone. But not really, because she's always hosting youth from around the world in her house. Right now she sleeps in the living room because she only has two bedrooms in her flat -- one for me and one for a student from Mali. But she doesn't mind, she says, "quand je suis avec les jeunes, je reste jeune" (When I'm with the youth, I stay young)

Last weekend we went to the center of the city, where we visited the fair trade business that she helped finance. She wanted to go discuss an idea that she had with a friend: a week long camp for young, poor artists in Tunisian. To inspire them. She loves to support the arts - painting, drawing, musicals. We spent 30 minutes in her friend's gallery, looking at a painting that depicted a woman inside a wine glass, musing about it's symbolism as we drank Tunisian tea. We have a system: she speaks in English, I respond in French. Sometimes we switch back and forth within the same sentence, and people on the street pause, trying to piece together our conversation. But it doesn't bother me. I'm too busy listening to her talk about any smattering of subjects: Shakira, the veil, Obama, racism in Tunis, poverty, the environment,verses in the Quaran, tennis, her jewish friends, abortion, government quotas, and her favorite Senegalese authors.

I often sit in the living room, her makeshift bedroom, attempting to read books in French while she does work on her computer, listening to the news in Arabic on the TV in the background while the blue and yellow curtains from Mali flutter in a doorway. But my concentration doesn't generally last for long, because we both like to talk instead of focus our tasks at hand. And I now have a bedtime routine -- I always make sure to stop by the living room, because inevitably she has already fallen asleep, book in hand, so I turn off the TV, gently shut the door, and unplug the lamp. It's my small attempt to try to give something back.

She's truly inspiring. Her sense of self, her curiosity about the world, her lack of dependence on material things, her emphasis on interpersonal relations, her desire to make a difference -- a real difference.

I couldn't ask for a better Tunisian Mother.

Modern Religious Art

Le Christ et Le Peintre (L’artiste et son Modèle)
Christ and the Painter (the artist and his model)
Marc Chagall
1951

Due to my inability to master simple stick-figure drawings, I have a huge respect for artists. Especially this one. I first encountered this painting in the Vatican Museum in the “Religious Modern Art” section. It's a little blurry, but the painting is a depiction of the crucifixion, and the man on the right is the a painter, holding a pallet and a paint brush, looking at Jesus. I think it is a beautiful social commentary about the nature of creating art, implying that we project ourselves, our expectations, our bias, our experiences into artwork (and many other things, for that matter). This insight was particularly refreshing after the previous 2 hours I had spent in the Vatican Museum.

Walking through the Vatican Museum, which contained literally miles of art from Ancient Rome to the Renaissance, it was interesting to think about what type of situations and people were missing. In particular, there was a notable lack of people of color. Almost every figure depicted reflected the stereotypical Italian form - fairly light skin, brown hair, (and, if you are looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a particularly muscular body).

Perhaps, in some sense, this is to be expected. Italian artists used friends and family members around them as inspiration - a fairly ethnically homogenous set of models. In many ways, it reminds me of the blue eyed, nicely combed wavy brown haired and paled skinned Jesus of my childhood. This, however, is far from a historically accurate physical representation of any first century Palestinian nomad, who would have had much darker skin, dark eyes, and most definitely less styled hair.

So clearly art reflects a particular social context in which is created, but I think that also has implications for shaping our worldview and expectations today. It concerns me that this homogenous representation of religious artwork in so many ways seems to reaffirm social hierarchies of class, race, and gender. For some, the artwork in the Vatican contains absolutely no significance. But for others, such as myself, the Vatican Museum represented some of the same problematic depictions of religious artwork throughout childhood and in popular culture.

While I was in the Sistine Chapel, my audio guided tour talked about Michelangelo's theology, how he viewed the body as a source of hope in creation despite great brokenness (as seen in the tortured bodies of The Last Judgment). This reflects a larger trend in Christianity, to see parts of humanity as redeemable -- this is present in everything from the importance of the humanity of Jesus to the common themes of transformation and renewal. But I think it does violence to these ideas when the images that are used to convey this sense of hope and renewal don't actually reflect the diversity of human life.

After all, to represent excerpts of the life of Jesus and parts of the New Testament in a way that actually reaffirms social inequality in their physical forms seems highly inconsistent with the narrative of a God that breaks through social expectations, gender norms, religious barriers, and constantly challenges systems of domination. I'm not advocating a return to a "historically accurate" portrayal of Jesus. Scholars greatly disagree on the physical depiction of Jesus, which is probably a good thing. I'm advocating that we should embrace diverse depiction of religious figures. What better way to affirm the radical inclusiveness of the gospels?

This is why I fundamentally think modern religious art is so important.

Modern religious art provides a space to break away from expected, and at times outdated, forms of religious imagery - to allow viewers to encounter divinity in their lives and their own communities as they have the chance to see their own reflection in the artwork.

Yet there needs to be more. Chagall merely brings attention to the process of creating religious art. For more boundary-pushing artists, I highly recommend:

Janet McKenzie’s Jesus of the People, winner of the National Catholic Reporter’s competition
Crucifixion by Sandra Yagi
Kittredge Cherry’s book “Art that Dares,” a Lambda Literary Award finalist

Of course, some will consider these images blasphemous. But I think its important to remember that, historically, we have taken plenty of liberty in our traditional religious imagery, which is unquestionably reproduced because it preserves dominant power structures. If Jesus can be blue eyed and white, Jesus can certainly be depicted as black, arab, female etc. And after centuries of exclusion and violence perpetuated by the church through racism, sexism, and homophobia (just to name a few), such art certainly captures the essence of the gospel by affirming the inclusion of those who have been marginalized.

While modern religious art might present new representations of old stories, such representations that break down social expectations, inequality and social injustice should certainly be celebrated, not shunned and condemned, by our religious communities.

These were my musings as I walked through the Vatican. I’d love to hear your thoughts! And below I’ve included some of my additional favorites from the modern art collection in the Vatican Museum.

10 things you might not know about Tunisia

1. Tunisia is in North Africa, about an hour-long flight from Rome, Italy. (see the map on my first blog entry) Tunisia is slightly larger than Florida.


2. The movie “Star Wars” was filmed in Tunisia. The desert is the home of Luke Skywalker. Also parts of “The English Patient” were filmed in Tunisia.


3. Arabic is the official language of Tunisia, although most people speak French as well. All of the street signs are written in Arabic and French. A small minority of people speak Berber, the language of the indigenous people. Most youth and businesspeople also know English.


4. There are palm trees. They are beautiful.


5. Most Tunisians pride themselves on their history as proponents of gender equality, and Tunisia is often referenced as a model Muslim-majority country in terms of female empowerment. Ever since winning independence from the French in 1956, President Bourguiba updated the “Personal Status Code,” which improved the legal status of women by requiring wives to give formal consent before marriage, outlawing polygyny, increasing female legal capacity in the realm of contracts, and making divorce subject to judicial review. Large scale access to family planning was supported by the government in the 1960s and abortion in Tunisia was legalized 1973, the same year as Roe v. Wade. As a result, Tunisia legally secured gender equity before more well-known European countries.


6. Camel rides are very popular attractions in the desert, particularly for tourist. It’s definitely on my to do list – ill report back later with pictures.


7. I made a huge eco-footprint traveling here. The impact of the fuel emissions for my roundtrip flight to Tunisia, like most international flights, produced 2.5 tons of CO2 – about the same impact as the yearly output of the average European car. For eco-friendly travelers, check out climatecare.org or carbonneutral.com to offset your travel ☺


8. Tunisia is an amazing crossroads of French and Arabic culture. In the morning, you can walk down the street, buy a fresh baguette and hear the call to prayer from the local mosque. The long white sandy beaches off Mediterranean coast make it a very popular destination for French vacationers.


9. Censorship is fairly prominent, especially during the current reign of Ben Ali, President since 1987. In particular, the small but notable fundamentalist Islamist party is illegal and cannot publish criticisms of the state. Most Tunisians newspapers are controlled by the state, although access to the Internet has greatly increased information exchange. My guidebook said that facebook would be blocked. It isn’t.


10. Tunisians love food spicy. Harissa is a hot red sauce made of peppers that seems to be mixed in to every dish. For example, today at lunch at my internship I was given a sandwich with tuna, and lots of harissa.

When in Rome ....

Buon giorno,

So, things to do when you are in Rome ....



























-- See the Pope

The pope speaks at the Vatican every Wednesday morning at 10:30am, and this past Wednesday was special because it was a national Italian holiday (independence day). I happened to arrive at the vatican at about 10:20 -- just in time to hear the pope speak. Supposedly about 30,000 people were there!










-- Admire the work of Michael Angelo & other famous artists.

The vatican city museum was breath-taking. In addition to the amazing Sistine Chapel, I particularly enjoyed the display of modern religious art. I couldn't take pictures inside the Sistine Chapel, but this is a picture of "The Thinker" by Rodin. Look forward to an additional blog post with pictures of my favorite pieces from the modern religious art section (and a small rant about why modern art is so important).










-- eat pizza

(I think this one's pretty self-explanatory)











-- Make a wish at the Trevi Fountain

If you throw 3 coins over your left shoulder for good luck, or to ensure you return to Rome (maybe both)










-- Shopping!

I'm not much for high fashion, but Rome's certainly the place to go. Vie de Condotti, across from the Spanish steps, has almost every high-fashion name in the business.









-- Eat gelato

You obviously can't tell from this photo, but I had nutella flavored gelato. And clearly the guy next to me thought I was crazy for taking a picture of myself.






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-- Observe a street artist

I was particularly impressed by this guy, who made all of his paintings in less than five minutes and by only using spray paint.











-- Dress in funny clothes

It seemed to be a common theme/a tourist trap for cheesy photos.










-- Eat Chinese Italian food

I know, what you are thinking .. she went to Rome to eat Chinese food? What can I say? I like my veggies -- I couldn't eat more bread, cheese, and tomato at this point. Plus I had to save room for Italian desert. (hey its better than Italian McDonalds!)








-- Stumble upon some colossal ruins

I was trying to find my shuttle to go back to the hostel and literally stumbled across the Colosseum and some other beautiful massive ancient building.






-- meet the locals

They have great food suggestions and are really friendly!


























-- take artsy photos

I got a little carried away :)



The main take away: I you need to get over jet-lag, spend a day in Rome! I had about 7 hours of sleep in 60 hours, but it was all worth it.

More updates about Tunisia soon!

ciao,
Joan

Summer Plans

Hey friends and family!

Thanks for visiting my blog -- I'm really excited about this summer and definitely want to keep in touch with you!

This past school year I worked with my professor from the class "Health Psychology in the Arab World and Africa" to arrange an internship in Tunis, Tunisia over the summer. My professor is from Tunisia, so she helped connect me to an amazing organization called CAWTAR (http://www.cawtar.org/) which is an Arab Women's Development group and also some great microfinance companies in Tunisia.





Some other highlights of my trip will be having a 26 hour layover in Rome on the way to Tunis and back from Tunisia. I will also visit Uganda, where I lived last summer for two months, to visit friends and a help support an orphanage that is co-run by a students from the Yale Divinity school.

Feel free to post/comment/ask questions about my travels and I'll try to respond as soon as possible (internet seems to be pretty good here). You can also email me at joanegass@gmail.com

Take care,
Joan