I am happy to share with you the good news from the MENA region.
This month, we are officially launching the P2P online incubation program.
Being part of the Edgeryders community, I strongly believe that collective intelligence has shown a great power to unlock, not only our creativity and our innovation capabilities, but it also unlocks the hidden potentials for collaboration and for alternative ways to mobilize resources.
That is why, collective intelligence will be the core philosophy of our next program, the P2P online incubator.
Through our experience in the MENA region, we have found that young people are full of energy, and some of them have brilliant ideas about how to address problems in their very local community.
Take for instance the amazing work done in MENA by the Edgeryders Community members. In addition to young people with ideas, there are others who have a variety of skills. Plenty of these young people are looking for ways to use their skills for the social good, and why not to make a living out of it, when an appropriate and a sustainable mechanism, that could be a social enterprise, is put in place.
To make this even more interesting for all the current and the potential and future stakeholders, we will be encouraging and pushing for ideas that promote the use of new technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and blockchain, to accelerate social innovation in the region and scale it up later on, and also look for young people who might have some of this set of skills.
Now, our work will be building connections between these two groups, by fostering conversations and P2P mentoring through the community calls or on the platform, so they can come together to innovative, efficient and scalable solutions for the challenges in their community.
To achieve these goals, Sohayeb and I have codesigned the following process in order to attract young people to the calls in first place, and to stimulate collective intelligence by encouraging conversations through the MENA YP.
Process
The target beneficiaries are mainly young people aged between 18 and 35 years old from Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan.
We have two targets :
a. Aspiring young social entrepreneurs
- They already have an idea of a social enterprise/venture
- They are in the process of validating their ideas
- They are looking for mentors, partners or any kind of support
- They are willing to have shareholders, and commit to start social entreprises
- They are aware of their communities’ problems, and thriving to solve them through entrepreneurship
b. Skilled young people
- Who do not have a project idea, but they aspire to be part of a social and innovative venture.
The process will be as following:
- Call for applications with all the necessary communication campaigns
- Applications on the platform, where all applicant must briefly introduce themselves and describe their project idea or their areas of skills.
- Preselection and matching
- CI calls
- Follow up conversations on the platform
- Final Selection
- Festival & Pitching
To sum up:
We strongly believe that there is a huge opportunity out there for all parties, whether the young professionals and entrepreneurs from the MENA region, their peers in Africa and in Europe, and finally for donors who might be interested eventually in building the bridges between them in the future, for collaboration and for knowledge sharing.
2. Project Time line ( Draft)
So one of the key steps to make this work, and I am really counting on you in this matter, is mobilizing mentors to provide high-quality community calls.
Not only so we can attract more innovators from the MENA region but also to build the trust in this program and in the power of collective intelligence to achieve progress. We need you in two ways:
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First to share with us the best practices for mobilizing and managing mentors, and if there were any successful prior experience within Edgeryders community.
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Second, we want to start build our mentors’ network right here, so if you are willing to dedicate few hours per a month to support aspiring young entrepreneurs from the MENA region, please let us know and tell us about your areas of expertise.
Remember, it is only FEW HOURS per month, and you might be eventually happily surprised by the outcomes of these few hours
Waiting for your comments and feedback!