Al Majmoua displays the achievements of its women’s business development program

The Lebanese Association for Development (Al Majmoua), released this week in Beirut, and in partnership with Cheri Blair Foundation, a joint statement addressing problems preventing women entrepreneurs from gaining access to the business market. Al Majmoua also announced the completion of its Development of Women’s Projects in Lebanon Program that trained over 364 business women on how to set up profitable and sustainable businesses. L’Orient Le Jour highlighted in its issue of today the success story of one of  the beneficiaries, Mona Hashem, who has forged a room inside her husband’s office to manufacture soap after completing training courses on marketing and communication with banking institutions. In this respect, Nada Yared, the executive Director of the UN Economic Committee for Europe ECE, described Hashem as a role model of the working woman in the informal sector. Yared noted that the principle recommendations set by a report centers around the facilitation of women entrepreneurs’ access to markets, and therefore merging women in the formal economy. Recommendations were particularly based on ECE date which indicated that as high as three quarters of Lebanese women work in the informal sector compared to the lower Work Bank figures which showed that only one out of four women in Lebanon is a working woman. Yared also pointed out to various difficulties facing women who wish to set up their own businesses, namely, the high cost of business registration (USD 2000-3000) and the cultural hurdles such as the requirement that a male sponsor (husband or brother) supports the application for a bank loan. In this vein, Maya Younes, from BLC Bank, indicated that her bank in collaboration with Al Majmoua is providing up to USD 20 thousand in personal business loans with no collateral required. (L’Orient Le Jour, September 17, 2015)