Badr Jafar, Chief Executive Officer of Crescent Enterprises and Managing Director of the Crescent Group, addressed the Abu Dhabi Entrepreneurship Forum yesterday to discuss the potential hurdles and opportunities for fostering entrepreneurship in the Gulf Region and the wider Arab World. The Forum was opened by His Excellency Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Culture, Youth and Community Development in the United Arab Emirates, and Lord Peter Mandelson, Chairman of Global Counsel and Lazard International in the United Kingdom. Other prominent speakers included Abdul Malik Al Jaber, Founder and Chairman of MENA Apps and ArabReneur and Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube.

During the discussion, Badr Jafar highlighted that the issue of youth unemployment could be alleviated through the development of entrepreneurship, and in-turn the creation of SMEs. Both are important to the region’s economy and in providing solutions to the wider socio-economic issues including the need to create over 200 million jobs in the next 20 years just to stop the rate of unemployment from increasing.

At a panel session in which Jafar also participated, speakers discussed the future of entrepreneurship in the region, with a focus on the imperative to create much needed youth employment, while ensuring that their active engagement in the process of building stable and sustainable economies. Badr Jafar stated: “We must continue to develop a cohesive ecosystem which generates these business models; from providing the most appropriate education systems, more flexible access to capital, building advocacy and mentorship programs. Moreover, we need to accelerate our efforts in these regards. The ultimate goal is that we create employers, not just employees.” Jafar added: “We cannot sit back and rely on the government to fill this void, which is why we must generate Private-Sector-led and Government-enabled solutions to our challenges.”

The Abu Dhabi Entrepreneurship Forum was hosted by the Khalifa Fund for Enterprise Development, a charity which was launched in 2007 to help develop local enterprises in the United Arab Emirates. The Fund aims to create a new generation of Emirati entrepreneurs by instilling and enriching the culture of investment amongst young people, as well as supporting and developing small to medium-sized investments in the Emirate through a series of programmes and support services to help entrepreneurs establish or expand their investments.
 

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