AMMAN - Intel Mediterranean Trading Company has launched three initiatives to create an "ecosystem of players" in Jordan that supports entrepreneurship, which is key to creating jobs.
"The three initiatives that we launched seek to encourage start-ups in Jordan and motivate NGOs and the entire society to pay more attention to entrepreneurial work," Ferruh Gurtas, corporate affairs director of Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Intel, told The Jordan Times during the World Economic Forum meetings that concluded at the Dead Sea on Sunday.
The first initiative, called the Intel Learn Programme, entails providing students in the country's schools with after-school curricula on the significance of entrepreneurship and how to start a business, he said.
The programme will be implemented in cooperation with the Ministry of Education, Gurtas said.
"The idea of the programme is to have extracurricular activities for students. It is important to create a culture that supports entrepreneurship and raising awareness among students is key to creating that culture," he said in the interview.
Another initiative that Intel launched is the Intel Youth Enterprise Programme, which seeks to motivate youth by suggesting ideas for start-ups that address local challenges in Jordan and how best to solve them, he said.
"This global project, which is starting in Jordan, asks young Jordanians who have already had start-ups or ideas for starts-ups to submit requests to a portal to be announced soon," he said.
"A total of 50 innovative start-up ideas will be short-listed and the best ten will be adopted by Intel, provided with training and skills and finance to grow and be translated into reality," Gurtas told The Jordan Times, adding that the deadline for submitting requests for the competition is November 11.
The third programme, to be implemented in cooperation with the Queen Rania Centre for Entrepreneurship, involves hosting a competition for start-ups in the ICT sector and invites IT graduates as well as current university students to come up with innovative ideas for projects in the sector, he said.
Some of their ideas will be chosen to compete with other start-ups and students in the US at the global level in November, he said, adding that the winners will be able to meet with venture capitalists who might be interested in investing in their projects.
© Jordan Times 2011
