The walls of Oasis500’s Amman headquarters are lined with ancient, inspirational quotes. “Small obstacles seem insurmountable in the eyes of small thinkers,” reads one, by the tenth century Arab poet Al-Mutanabbi, “while grand challenges seem trivial in the eyes of the great.”
Just feet away, the small, glass-walled office of Saleem Najjar, a 31-year-old Damascene, is lined with more perfunctory language. Words such as “engagement”, “motivation” and “profitability”, scrawled on a whiteboard behind the stocky, bespectacled startup founder might not carry the same weight as Al-Mutanabbi’s. But few would suggest the triviality of his own situation.
Najjar is one of several Syrians working in Jordan, whose lives were turned upside down by their country’s amaranthine conflict, that rages just a few dozen miles from Amman, Jordan’s sweeping capital. He was just finding success when it began. In 2009 Damascus’ Old City was a busy warren of tight-knit streets, shops and restaurants. He saw an opportunity for a “kind of Yelp for Syria”, he tells me. Within two years Najjar had 200 restaurants on his site, Mataamy.com (“my restaurant” in Arabic). A local VC firm invested a small amount and the company even won a startup competition organised by oil giant Shell. Najjar had an office, and five employees. He wanted to scale.
Then war broke. Rebels and Islamists daubed the Old City’s walls with anti-government samizdat. Anyone walking around could be stopped and accused of writing it. That meant detention, torture – even death. Almost overnight, the entire neighbourhood emptied. Najjar decided to get out of Syria. “I thought it won’t be safe in the coming days, and this was just the start,” he says. “I felt it was going to be very, very bad.”
By then Najjar was already supporting his mother Nada, sister Sally and brother Sam – whose severe disability needed round-the-clock care. In 2012 he got a passport from the Syrian government and moved them all to Amman, a sandstone sprawl of four million people, almost half of Jordan’s entire population. Amman already had a reputation as a regional tech hub. It had accelerators, like Oasis500 and the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship. Multinationals such as Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco and Samsung ran offices at the King Hussein Business Park, a huge, cubist complex on the city’s western limit. It even had major startup success stories: Yahoo!’s 2009 purchase of Maktoob for $164 million raised eyebrows worldwide.
Oasis500 in particular was on the lookout for Syrian entrepreneurs. In 2012 it graduated ShopGo, an e-commerce platform created by Syrian Moe Ghashim. Today, ShopGo employs dozens of people and has an office in Dubai. Buoyed by its own success Oasis500 now has 2,500 companies in its pipeline, and will launch a $20m fund in the first quarter of 2018. But for Najjar, things were tough. Amman was far more expensive than Damascus, and his savings ran dry. Jordanians were already replicating Mataamy’s model in the country. “I needed a quick plan,” he says. “A startup plan.”
Four hundred thousand Syrians have been killed in their country’s civil war. Five million are displaced. Officially, 659,593 of them have travelled to Jordan, with which Syria shares a 229-mile border. Jordan’s government estimates the real figure to be around double that, at a cost of around $10 billion. Jordan is facing its own employment problems, and efforts to find work for its new Syrian inhabitants have been fraught. Oasis500, like a handful of NGOs, has realised that tech entrepreneurialism is an ideal way to create new jobs – and solve economic issues doing so.
Suleiman Arabiat, Oasis500’s operations manager, tells me he looks for talent wherever it is, including Syria. “The whole entrepreneurial DNA is the same all over the world. It’s about spotting a problem somewhere and solving it. Does the Syrian situation motivate that? Sure, but we know that it has demotivated others.” This March Jordan’s King Abdullah II, who has appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and accelerated economic reforms to accommodate tech, hailed innovative entrepreneurs as “future avenues for prosperity”. ICT now represents around 12 per cent of Jordan’s GDP.
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But unemployment is still a big worry for the country. It currently hovers just below 18 per cent. For men the figure is 13.9 per cent, while almost a third of the kingdom’s women are without work. Its statistics department attributes the alarming lack of roles for women to an increase in informal work, and the influx of refugees. Oasis500 is one of the organisations trying to change that. Of the 185 entrepreneurs it has invested in since 2011, 23 have been women. It’s a small, but growing number. Its creative industries fund, which endows journalists, designers, musicians and other artists, has awarded funds to four women from ten successful applicants. Of Oasis500’s dozen key team members, seven are women. “These numbers can only show that female founders in Jordan and the MENA region are proving themselves as equally capable as male founders,” says Oasis500 marketing chief Nora Al Moghrabi.
Lara Shahin is one example. When the war started Damascus-born Shahin, 35, began helping those fleeing violence in other provinces, alongside some friends, with food and money. But soon government forces began taking notice. When in 2012 two of Shahin’s collaborators were kidnapped and beaten, she knew she had to escape. When she arrived in Amman, Shahin, who is affable and holds her cigarettes upright like a French film star, decided she would continue to help those affected by the war. She has two brothers who were stopped from entering Jordan. They now live in Munich, Germany: her mother and father “cry every day,” she says.
Having visited refugees’ homes Shahin would see the women crafting household goods: soap, crochet, table decorations. “When I see that I think, ‘Why don’t we help these families to make products?’. I help them sell the products so they work and don’t need any help,” she tells me. Shahin began work in 2013 with five women in a 40-square-metre office, training and selling Syrian handicrafts (Syria’s textile industry employed 30 per cent of the country’s workforce before the outbreak of war). Some women were widows. Others could not bring their husbands due to Jordan’s immigration rules. Others’ husbands were still fighting.
Within a year Shahin had over a hundred women on the books. She called the firm Jasmine. But it faced two major problems: how to reach customers online, and – more importantly – how to register her company in Jordan as a Syrian. For the first, she turned to Najjar, who by then had founded his second startup.
Spend enough time speaking to Syrians in Amman and you will hear the same phrase over and over: work permit. While Jordan has taken in a huge number of migrants from its northern neighbour, and provided shelter and education in cities and locations like the huge, 80,000-populated Zaatari Refugee Camp, putting them to work has proved harder. In February 2016 Jordan, with backing from the EU, launched the Jordan Compact: a drive to provide 200,000 work permits for Syrians. By March 2017, only 35,000 had been handed out.
In August this year authorities eased restrictions on permits in the construction industry. But for startup founders, who are not employees, asking authorities for a work permit is often Kafka-esque, and unsuccessful. There are two routes: either pay 50,000 Jordanian dinars (£53,586) and partner with a local, or pay 200,000JOD (£214,344) to be classified as an investor.
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The rules stem partly from an earlier influx of Syrians, who fled their homes in 1982 when Hafez Al Assad, the father and predecessor to current president Bashar, massacred residents of the town of Hama to put an end to six years of Islamist uprisings. Jordanians complained their new neighbours undercut wages and took work away from locals. For Shahin, the rule was disastrous. Her Jordanian partner stole stock, money – “my company”. Police told her there was no recourse to justice. “It was very bad but it’s a lesson for me,” she says. Shahin closed her doors, and registered Jasmine as an NGO with a Jordanian name.
Najjar has also had problems with his work permit. By last August he had pitched his latest concept, Sharqi.shop, “a customisable Etsy for the region,” to Oasis500. In September Sharqi was green-lit. But Oasis500 only gives funding to companies that are already registered. By the end of 2016 Najjar found the 50,000JOD required to register Sharqi alongside a local. But it was almost everything he had. The next four to five months were “very tough,” he says. At one point he only had 100JOD (£107) in his bank account.
Work permits are one of three issues that Oasis500 is lobbying Jordan’s government to change. It wants the country to follow Ireland’s lead of relaxing rules, that has brought it thousands of jobs from tech heavyweights like Facebook and Google. Another problem is that startups must work from a “closed space” to be registered, disqualifying those who have co-working desks. The third issue is opening up greater diplomatic channels regarding the tech industry. In this, Oasis500 has found success: Jordan now has an investment minister in its cabinet.
For now, however, Syrians working in Jordan’s tech scene must face additional hurdles in their paths to success. Syrian driver’s licences are not accepted as ID by Jordanian authorities, for example. And travel outside the country can take up to two months for approval. Shahin now runs her NGO from a small, cramped office above a bank on one of Amman’s busiest streets. With help from Sharqi, she now sells items online and on social media – and helps thousands of women make a living in Amman.
“I love Amman,” she says. “Because it’s very near to Damascus, and additionally in way of life. I feel the same weather. I love people here. I can help Syrian refugees more here than in other countries.” She still has problems with bureaucracy, she adds. But things are improving. If the war in Syria ends, she wants to move back in a year. Najjar would return too. He likes Amman, and Jordanians – “I want to be part of them,” he says – but he doesn’t feel the same excitement in Amman as in Damascus, which is the world’s oldest continually inhabited capital city. “You feel there is…a soul in Damascus. I would like to go back and work there. But in terms of business and scaling it, Amman is much better.”
There are many more obstacles to overcome. But Najjar is confident he can rise to the grand challenges described by Al-Mutanabbi beside his desk. Hopefully for he and his compatriots, Jordan can overcome its shortfalls and capitalise on its newfound tech talent.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
