Lessons in empowerment from a Yemeni entrepreneur: a conversation with Adeeb Qasem
Adeeb Qasem is the Founder and Chairman of ROWAD Entrepreneurs Foundation, a Yemen-based non-profit focused on supporting Yemeni entrepreneurs in their startup journeys. While earning an MBA at Oxford University, Adeeb was inspired to support Yemeni entrepreneurs and enlisted friends to create ROWAD in 2013 to help advance the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Yemen. Since then, ROWAD has partnered with many local and international organizations, companies and donors to support youth innovation and entrepreneurship and has grown to become one of the most impactful organizations to improve business development in Yemen. Adeeb has recently finished an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, and is currently a fellow at the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT. Cusp Impact interviewed Adeeb to learn more about his experience navigating the challenges of developing and growing ROWAD in Yemen. Read more about ROWAD here.
How did you come up with the idea for the ROWAD Foundation?
While I was earning my MBA, I wanted to connect with potential Yemeni co-founders and develop mentors to help me think about some startup ideas in Yemen. As I attempted to do so, I realized that there was a gap in the NGO landscape. There was no support readily available to me or other potential entrepreneurs like myself. NGOs seemed to be focused on micro-business on one side of the spectrum and large family corporations on the other side. So instead of meeting successful businessmen and entrepreneurs individually, I started to host events and invite others. After doing a number of these events, I started to think about other interventions that could help build the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Yemen. I then formalized these initiatives by starting the organization to allow us to sustain efforts and grow impact.
What is your proudest achievement through ROWAD?
I am very proud of our team and our ability to adapt and keep providing value. In 2015, the Yemen conflict became regional, and we had just celebrated the opening of our new business incubator with the first event hosting a number of Yemeni founders. We had to rethink our approach to all our projects, figure out how to shift to 100% solar energy, how to connect with the entrepreneurs we were supporting across the country and move our mentorship and training program from face-to-face meetings to using phones, because even the internet was not always reliable. This resilience and adaptability still serves the team well when dealing with situations like COVID-19.
What drives and/or inspires you?
I am driven by a belief in the abilities and potential of the youth in Yemen and the Arab world. I always feel inspired when I see Yemeni entrepreneurs’ initiatives and startups, and their relentless work and attempts to fix major economic, political and social problems in a very challenging environment. Each individual story reminds me of the potential of the collective.
What is it like to do entrepreneurship in Yemen with the ongoing civil war and humanitarian crisis?
The unfortunate and wasteful conflict in Yemen also has regional aspects to it, but beyond categorization of the conflict, as one would expect it is very challenging to do entrepreneurship in Yemen, yet it is very much needed. The scope of entrepreneurship work in Yemen doesn’t necessarily abide to the form we might see in the US with its strong focus on the return multiples. Our youth are engaging with the humanitarian crisis and the many other economic and social problems. Youth initiatives are taking place all over the country. Only a small number engage with these issues from an innovative or tech driven approach. One of the main challenges facing youth is the lack of access to risk capital to allow them to move from ideation to MVPs and from MVPs to traction and scaling. Those who do manage to start their Innovation-Driven Enterprises (IDEs) have to create the whole market and structure around them. For example, Wagabat, a delivery app startup, built and trained a fleet of delivery drivers from scratch, educated restaurant owners and customers, and developed payments systems and digital wallets.
What are the biggest challenges that you face in cultivating entrepreneurship in Yemen?
Entrepreneurship’s biggest challenge in Yemen as with the whole economy is the ongoing conflict and the way this conflict impacts all aspects of life from impacting access to public services like electricity, water and sanitation, to weakening infrastructure with slower internet connections, and closed ports and higher cost of transportation. These major challenges create additional challenges like deterrence to investors to invest in Yemeni entrepreneurs.
What are the lessons that you learned from grappling with these challenges?
Through the years I spent working with Yemeni entrepreneurs, I learned that while stability, infrastructure and services are required to help create a vibrant entrepreneurship ecosystem, entrepreneurs as real change agents in their societies and even in absence of these requirements will work on innovative ways to execute on their ideas. Their work will mobilize resources in the short and long run to help overcome these major challenges. Entrepreneurs will find innovative ways to build markets and, in the process, create jobs and lobby for stability and economic prosperity.
In what ways did your education shape who you are today? Do you have any advice for aspiring students?
Education and the schools I have attended had a lot of impact on who I am today. From the overcrowded, under-equipped high school classes in Sana’a with many aspiring youth and very limited opportunities, to classes at universities like Oxford and Harvard which pushed me out of my comfort zone to unlearn and relearn. My MBA gave me the confidence to start a business and a foundation, and now my MPA is allowing me to rethink the impact of the work I am doing and how to deepen and scale it. A professor advised me to hold the mindset of a learner, to always be ready and humble to learn from your team and from the people you are trying to serve.
What is your advice for someone who is just starting as an entrepreneur?
I still consider myself a learning entrepreneur. What I would tell others is what I tell myself about the hard work to expect when starting a new venture, and the need for dedication to the problem, because solutions might evolve and change from the first conceptualized idea. I’m starting to have a new appreciation for the advice to try to do unscalable work.
What work experience would you say is the most valuable for your personal development?
Successes as well as failures throughout my career pushed me to adapt to new demands and re-examine where my failures in leadership limit the potential of an idea. One tough experience was the breakup of a long partnership. Partnerships take a lot of work and time to develop and the end of one usually also introduces loss of value created over time in a business idea or potential future work. The experience pushed me out of my comfort zone and forced me to re-examine the importance of sustaining partnerships over time.
What qualities and skills do you think are most important to have in today’s world? How can we start to learn and practice these qualities and skills?
One of the most important skills is the ability to work collaboratively. This means challenging oneself to understand those engaged or interested in the same outcomes and find options to move the work forward. This skill is relevant no matter your position, and it can be practiced on a daily basis by focusing on finding solutions to solidify collaboration of all stakeholders.
This interview was conducted by Adiva Zahira, consulting intern at Cusp Impact
