Translating Business
In Season 1, Episode 1 of empowerME Conversations podcast, host Amjad Ahmad interviews Tarjama Founder and CEO Nour Al Hassan about what drove her to become an entrepreneur, her company’s prescient flexible work model that has promoted women’s economic inclusion as well as resilience, and her policy wish list to help more endeavors like hers succeed in the Middle East.
Women are empowered. They just need the opportunity. If they are given the opportunity, they’ll be able to do anything!”
Key Takeaways
0:00 Intro
0:49 Nour shares her entrepreneurial journey, how she started her business and importance of working from home
2:49 Nour talks about how it was like to start a business in Jordan and how the ecosystem was back then
3:54 Nour shares the reasons that made her move from Jordan to UAE
5:56 Nour also talks about the importance of education and making people aware that working from home doesn’t mean the quality of the work is bad
7:43 Nour talks about why women participation rate in the economy is low despite them having a very high literacy and educational rate such as flexibility
10:36 Nour also talks about flexibility and the impact that COVID has made on flexibility and how nowadays people can work from anywhere
11:35 Nour explains why culture or husband not wanting his wife to work are not the only issues that causes low participation of women in the economy
12:42 Nour also shares her sense of the entrepreneurial ecosystem today and how she sees it differently
13:37 Nour shares her thoughts on where she thinks still a lot more needs to be done in concern with the ecosystem and how they hinder scalability of a business
15:31 Nour talks about government regulations, how some of them hinder businesses from scaling up and what could be done
16:35 Nour shares her thoughts on if the UAE is headed in the right direction in terms of ownership and if it’s impacted her
18:28 Nour talks about the importance of technology in a business and why she is digitalizing her company
23:14 Nour talks about how the Ureed.com platform is unlocking more women to participate in the economy
24:14 Nour also talks about how Ureed.com has unlocked more clients globally for her company
25:00 Nour shares the vision of Tarjama and where their focus will be in the next few years to come
26:41 Nour shares her thoughts on what it’s going to take to be innovative and stop borrowing ideas from others in terms of AI, machine learning and all the new technology
28:59 Nour talks about the positive and the negative changes that she is seeing in Saudi in terms of business
31:53 Nour shares the role that Amman plays in terms of connecting talented humans with businesses for them to grow
33:38 Nour also talks about what her biggest challenge in the business is and what needs to be done
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The empowerME conversations podcast features conversations with business and government leaders shaping the Middle East. The podcast sheds light on key opportunities and challenges for companies and governments, and Season 1 will focus on top regional entrepreneurs and their path to success as well as struggles they faced along the way.
empowerME at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East is shaping solutions to empower entrepreneurs, women, and youth and building coalitions of public and private partnerships to drive regional economic integration, prosperity, and job creation.
