Aside from bringing up women entrepreneurs’ success stories, the first panel showed how the digital world has become so pervasive and how new job opportunities in this sector can therefore be created whereby technology has taken the lead in all industries. Dr. Nibal Idlebi, head of Innovation Section at ESCWA Lebanon tackled this approach to inaugurate the first panel as its moderator, saying that technology cannot be considered a sector in itself, hence the need to invest in it across all sectors, and most importantly to reap its fruits at the social level.
How to capitalize on technology at the social level; a question that has led to the core of the first panel’s discussions whereby women entrepreneurs started sharing their experiences with Dr. Idlebi. The latter mentioned several studies revealing that women account for 16% of the labor force in the economic field across the Arab region, a small percentage compared to men. “Women’s presence in this sector gives a huge economic push to the GDP in any given state, knowing that out of the 72 million young Arab people, 32 million young women are unemployed, and if ever their potential were to be invested in economy, women’s added value would be around 50 billion US dollars annually”, she added. Read more...
Just to tell how impressed I was by the sixth annual session of NAWF. It was indeed an extremely interesting conference with excellent discussions. The quality of topics and speakers made this event very successful and contributed to enrich the debate on women's issues in the Middle East.
The group of presenters and panelists this year was very good, and I found the event successful and on topic. I commend you and your team for selecting such an excellent array of women and men leaders from across the region who shared their experiences and their views on the opportunities and challenges for women entrepreneurs in the Arab region. I wish you the best in future events.
Thank you so much for inviting me to join you in this conference. I thoroughly enjoyed it and learnt a great deal.
The efforts you invested resulted in a great, well organized conference with interesting and inspiring panels and speakers.
Mabrouk on a wonderful conference. We found it inspiring and very useful as a networking event. Your team was friendly and high professional - thank you.
Thank you very much, and bravo for this lovely 5th edition of NAWF! All of us highly appreciate that the event was very well organized, the exchanges (sometimes quite lively!) as well as the quality of the speakers.