Doha: Qatar has been highlighting the importance of providing resources that help in the empowerment of women in all fields. Founder Institute is empowering and enabling women entrepreneurs from around the world in starting and growing businesses discussed experts during a webinar.
The Founder Institute (FI) organised webinar on ‘Women’s Roundtable: Starting, Growing, Scaling a Business in Qatar’ that brought together women entrepreneurs, investors, and startup experts from the region and internationally who shared stories, best practices, and pitfalls to avoid. The event gave an understanding about how to leverage technology for business growth and on the role of entrepreneurial ecosystems to support women entrepreneurs.
Dr. Hanan El Basha, Co-Director at the Qatar Chapter of Founder Institute said, “Founder Institute is the number one place in the world to turn ideas into fundable startups, and startups into global business. Speaking about the concept of globalised businesses she noted, the economy and the technology is enabling us to be much closer to any and every market around the world.”
“We believe there are great entrepreneurs everywhere that can be empowered to build great businesses, but they lack feedback and structure at the earliest stages. Our accelerators help entrepreneurs in the pre-seed stages move quickly, know what to do next, and build fundable, global businesses,” El Basha said.
“The Founder Institute program is coming up and as the co-director of Qatar Chapter I have taken the pledge to empower more women to start, grow and scale technology-based and technology-enabled businesses, to show up in the world and share all their talents, dreams and aspirations,” she added.
Dr. Luana Ozemela, Fellow Co-Director of the Qatar Chapter and Founder and CEO of DIMA said, “Four years ago I started business in Qatar as I saw an opportunity to use my knowledge to the benefit of private sector and now I am helping companies large or small make the business case in investing in women around the globe which is making financial markets more diverse and inclusive”. The trend we have seen historically is that women are getting more and more educated and the rate at which the women are advancing is much faster. We need to be more creative, Ozemela explained. Speaking about the innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem she said, “We need more programs in early stage, pre-seed stage and work with the academia, with the coworking space and funds and training investors,” she added.
Sondos Alkharisha, Founder, Educarso, an online educational platform for deaf and hearing impaired said “We are trying to make huge impact in education and make it more accessible and reachable to minority of the people especially deaf students. Our solution is to make education accessible to those with hearing disability and we are trying to put innovation in our solution.”
Alkharisha shared the journey of incubation at Digital Incubation Center (DIC), “I want to thank DIC in helping us and the mentor sessions also helped us in digital marketing and for empowering the women around the world,” she said.
