Silicon Valley on the Nile?
On a recent morning in Qena, a poverty-stricken region a few hundreds miles south of Cairo, Usama Ghazali sped through the dusty landscape in his village’s communal truck. It was a busy day for the tall indefatigable 34-year old. After taking caring of his elderly mother, he met with a group of his workers—women weaving scarves in the thick summer heat. Then he was off to figure out an unreliable train schedule back to Cairo, where he was set to show the scarves to someone who had taken an interest in his business: Hillary Clinton, the American secretary of state. “I’m going to tell Hillary I have an idea,” he says, smiling. “And I think it will change Egypt.”
Nearly two years after a popular uprising, and with the country stuck dangling between its past and future, Ghazali is part of Egypt’s growing number of entrepreneurs who want to propel the nation forward, despite a dire economy, high unemployment and only a vague political will for change. The odds are stacked against them.
In her visit to Egypt last summer, Clinton made time between meetings with the country’s military junta and the Muslim Brotherhood to visit a group of entrepreneurs mentored by Flat6Labs, a Cairo-based firm that provides seed money and support to aspiring business owners. The two-year old startup has been receiving hundreds of applications for about six spots in the program, which open up every three months. They’ve launched 18 technology firms this past year and 10 have already found investors.
Ghazali and his two friends--Flat6Lab’s first group from rural Egypt--are building the Egyptian version of Etsy, a popular website that showcases and sells the work of independent artists and craft workers. Their company Yadaweya, or “handmade” in Arabic, will sell the work of artisans across Egypt, and simultaneously tell the story of their lives. Their hope is to use e-commerce to preserve jobs for Egypt’s craft workers, who still comprise a large proportion of the country’s labor force, but now face an uncertain future in a globalized world.