Social Entrepreneurs of the Year for the Arab World Awarded

Dead Sea, Jordan, 22 October 2011 – Two Social Entrepreneurs – one from Egypt and one from Jordan – were recognized as leading social innovators during a Plenary Session at the World Economic Forum Special Meeting on Economic Growth and Job Creation in the Arab World at the Dead Sea, Jordan, on October 22. The awards were conferred by Hilde Schwab, Co-Founder and Chairperson of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.

Social Entrepreneurs provide innovative, cost-effective, scalable solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges – a critical resource in today’s economic climate. They blend business acumen with social objectives to address poverty and environmental challenges, and can, with limited resources, have transformative effects – not just on marginalized communities and populations where they often work, but also on entire sectors and economies. 

The following social entrepreneurs received awards at the Meeting.

Curt Rhodes – Questscope - Jordan

Questscope provides peer-to-peer mentoring and educational alternatives to help reintegrate marginalized and at-risk youth into mainstream entrepreneurial and social opportunities. In partnership with the Jordanian Ministry of Education, Questscope designed and implemented the first accredited non-formal education curriculum in the Arab world, enrolling more than 7,000 young people in basic education, with half of them obtaining diplomas and a further 600 graduating from vocational training. Four thousand student volunteers from five Jordanian universities have been trained and supervised to mentor 6,000 youth offenders. Integral to the Questscope model are strong national partnerships in the public and business sectors, “bottom-up” policy advocacy and a high level of attention to individuals. Mentoring (including children of prisoners) and alternative education programmes have been expanded to Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Northern Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon.

Sameh Seif Ghali – Together Association for Development and the Environment – Egypt

Working in five governates in Upper Egypt, the Together Association has brought innovative and low-cost sanitation technologies to some of the region’s most isolated villages. The sanitation system, designed by Seif, can serve several thousand households and costs less than a third of more traditional systems, thus enabling Egypt’s rural poor to access proper sanitation services they previously could not afford. To assure the sustainability and local ownership of the projects, the Together Association works directly with community organizations and leaders and also offers microloans to enable individual households to connect to the village sewage grid. Through its many partners, the Together Association has been able to provide a variety of value-added community development services to its constituents, including employment training, and to date more than 37,000 Egyptians have directly benefited from the Together Association’s sanitation systems and other services.

 

 

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