A Blossoming Business in Tunisia

As a flower farmer, Jalila Tamallah has found a way to grow a better life for her family in Tunisia. She has become an astute businesswoman in the process, expanding her interests to raising livestock as well with the help of good profits and microcredit loans. Far from the turbulence of the Arab Spring, Tamallah says she has quietly gained something many in the region demand — the chance to build for a future. “We came here and we learned little by little,” she tells Arabic Knowledge@Wharton. “Now, I am the manager.”

Read the full interview on Arabic Knowledge@Wharton

After the Nobel Prize: Women Struggle to Participate in a Post-Arab Spring Yemen

Halima Gellman was in Yemen for seven months spanning the Arab Spring protests and five months in the aftermath, evaluating the gender issues that Yemeni women encounter and how they’re able to achieve political participation in the transition period. Gellman says she originally came to Yemen “thinking I was going to write my thesis on Yemeni women as peace-builders in local resource conflicts. When I got here, in the latter part of the revolution and started talking to women, they said to me, “You’re here at a historical moment. You should focus on the revolution.”

Read the full interview:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/arabic/article.cfm?articleid=2871

Economist Tyler Cowen On the Arab Spring, and Why Wal-Mart Will Benefit Africa

Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University, has recently published a book called An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies about how you can apply basic theories of economics to get the best meal for your money.

He tells Arabic Knowledge@Wharton, most people don’t realize there is not a shortage of food, but rather too many poor people unable to pay for it. Cowen also discusses how food prices and trade barriers in the Middle East helped drive the Arab revolutions.

“If you look at wheat and rice, there have been price spikes over the last five years and they’ve made food a lot harder for poor people to afford,” Cowen notes. “The so-called “Green Revolution” has somewhat slowed down. This is an unreported story. Crop yields are stagnant. It isn’t a problem we can solve overnight but it’s really one of the biggest problems in the world. It hardly gets any publicity. But for poor people in India, the Middle East and parts of Africa, it really matters.

“Some of the problems are we don’t have enough trade. It could be either legal barriers or just costly to transport or trade things. If there could be a shortage of rice in one place, it actually not that easy to ship a lot of rice in there because of bad roads and so on.”

Read the full interview here: 
http://bit.ly/MLzJxl

Wharton’s Karl Ulrich: Three Things Needed to Grow Middle East Innovation

Reflecting on the issue of youth unemployment raised by the Arab Spring protests, Wharton professor Karl Ulrich says governments should follow some key rules to bolster innovation in the region.

“The role of government in innovation is first and foremost to create a healthy environment for innovation. That means stable regulation, strong property rights for investors, immigration and travel policies that allow the efficient flow of human resources, and fair protection of intellectual property. Next, I believe government should invest in education. I’m less enthusiastic about direct investment in specific innovation projects. I don’t think governments have demonstrated a capability to pick winners at the project or company level.”

Ulrich came to Abu Dhabi to oversee Wharton’s first innovation tournament in the region. Ulrich was impressed by the entries, which focused on sustainability projects, noting that the competitors showed the same aspirations and approach as innovators in Silicon Valley or Philadelphia.

Read the full interview here: 
http://bit.ly/LGdxlR

Advice from Muhammad Yunus to Young People Everywhere: Take Responsibility, and Take Over

To the Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, the Arab Spring was an expression of frustration by young people in the region of how little change was happening in their societies. He tells Arabic Knowledge@Wharton his advice to young demonstrators in the Arab world, and elsewhere, is to take responsibility for seeing that change happen.

“Young people see solutions are possible, they see a new life is possible. The old generation is still looking at the traditional way of handling everything. And that is the mismatch that will cause more problems. In 20 years from now the world will be completely different, because of that wave of technology, because of that wave of regeneration coming in.

“Just go ahead, take responsibility and make it happen. They will appreciate you for it. They’re not your enemies. Simply they don’t feel you are mature enough to handle that. Show them you are. It’s like any parent and their kids; they’ll treat them that way even if they are grown up. Not only have you grown up, you have much more experience and ideas than they do, in this short time, because your speed is much faster than theirs.”

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http://bit.ly/KZcDBN

Middle East Social Entrepreneurship Rises with Arab Spring

The Arab Spring brought tumult to the Middle East, but the demonstrations have also ushered in new aspects to civil life in Arab society. Egypt this month saw its first free presidential elections in its history as a result, and Arab youth across the region have used new media as an unfiltered way to express themselves and organize as they never could before. Researchers at Stanford University say that the Arab Spring has also lent itself to furthering the development of social entrepreneurship in the region.

Researchers at Stanford University say that the Arab Spring has also lent itself to furthering the development of social entrepreneurship in the region. According to its March report,Social Entrepreneurship: Why It Is Important After the Arab Spring, “unanimously across the region, young people are more interested in improving their communities and contributing to the long-term development of their societies after the revolution.”

The upsurge in social media use following the Arab Spring protests has translated into greater efforts in social entrepreneurship, as the medium has appealed to a young Arab population that is very idealistic about causing change,” said Racha Mourtada, research associate at the Dubai School of Government, which has been conducting ongoing studies into the use of social media in the region.

Read the full story here: bit.ly/LGgi6p

Booz & Company’s Joe Saddi: The Arab Spring Toppled Governments, but High Unemployment Remains the Region’s Biggest Concern

Now a year beyond the first flush of the Arab Spring movements throughout Northern Africa and other parts of the Middle East, the difficulties of economic uplift in the area are becoming apparent. In a way, the sudden successes of the uprisings, particularly in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, mask the real long-term difficulties of laying the foundations for sustained economic viability for the region.

Joe Saddi, the chairman of Booz & Company, has long done business in the region and spoke about both the Arab Spring’s upsides and downsides at the first Wharton Middle East North Africa (MENA) business conference recently.

“I hear often the phrase, ‘The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’,” said Saddi. “But now that the opportunity to have an economic success is there, we can no longer afford to do that.”

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http://bit.ly/H9VmIn

Regimes Will Not Control Egypt Again: Journalist Randa Fouad

An entire generation of Egyptians grew up under strongman Hosni Mubarak, and few could ever see an alternative to his rule, often quietly joking he was the ‘pharaoh for life.’ Journalist Randa Fouad says she was among the skeptics when protestors first gathered at Tahrir Square.

But the swift end to Mubarak’s military regime, she says, emboldened her countrymen to rethink Egypt’s future. Despite the country’s ongoing political and social turmoil, Fouad is optimistic, telling Arabic Knowledge@Wharton that whatever develops, “Egypt belongs to the Egyptians now. It does not belong to any regime.”

Read the full interview here: 
http://t.co/kusukHKz

UCL’s Malcolm Grant on Cost and Collaboration Challenges for Higher Education

As the U.K. government curtails funding to schools and colleges, University College London president and provost Malcolm Grant finds himself very popular with student protestors. But Grant acknowledges the burden put on students, who just over a decade ago enjoyed free higher education.

Grant says there are ways for schools to manage costs and still conduct worthwhile research and provide intellectual innovation. One critical step, he says, is greater collaboration between universities in researching key contemporary issues.

“Our view is in this globalized world it can’t be the universities alone that sit at home, we have to I think engage with globalization; and it’s not sufficient to do what we’ve done for decades, which is to have the world come to us,” he tells Arabic Knowledge@Wharton.

“Like most of the really research-intensive universities around the world, we are turning down huge numbers of proposals to establish ourselves elsewhere. We have to be able to do it at a pace that we can manage, because there’s a huge drawdown on senior management time to do any of these ventures. And we have to be satisfied that it fits with our mission and what we want to do.”

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http://t.co/1I8MsUIG

Watch What You Type: Social Media a Tool for Revolutionaries, and Increasingly, for Security Agencies

Most likely your social media accounts are already under scrutiny, even in the United States. The news is replete with headlines of just how closely authorities are monitoring social media sites. Security agencies say data analysis of social media is important, providing them with another tool to identify potential terror threats and criminal activity. But advocacy groups are concerned such surveillance goes far beyond that scope, and that often social media is monitored in countries to abuse human rights and thwart political opposition with the assistance of Western-developed technology.

“If protests are seen as a crime by some governments, and they are considered as solidarity or free expression by the public, it is a difference between public and strictly legal analyses,” says  Andrea M. Matwyshyn, assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton Business School.

Read the full story here: 
http://bit.ly/z0DauW