Nadine Halabi, Manager, Business Development at Dubai Business Women Council and Natasha Jamal, VP – Communications, Middle East and North Africa, MasterCard discuss their Ro’Ya programme.

What is the Ro’Ya initiative?

On 25 September 2013, a MasterCard delegation led by Ann Cairns, President, International Markets for MasterCard met HE Dr. Raja Easa Saleh Al Gurg, President, Dubai Business Women Council to announce a collaboration between the two entities aimed at driving and fostering entrepreneurship among women in the UAE.

Ro’Ya, which means vision in Arabic, has been conceptualised as a result of the partnership. Its main aim is to encourage women entrepreneurs to pursue business ventures by providing them with coaching and mentorship and, a select few, with financial assistance.

Each year, three winners receive funding worth $100,000 combined to help them turn their ideas into an actual business and develop it further.

How has Mastercard/DBWC contributed to Ro’Ya and how do each of the partners add value to the initiative?

The initiative is funded by MasterCard with DBWC acting as the primary organiser. Running concurrently alongside the application process, MasterCard and DBWC organise a series of coaching and training sessions to share insights into various aspects of conceptualising and managing a successful business entity.

The sessions aim at supporting the participants of the initiative by providing them with all the necessary information that they may need to put together a business plan. The workshop series’ schedule can be found on the Ro’Ya website (www.roya.ae).

This year, Ro’Ya is being run in collaboration with three main think-tank partners – grow.ME, ActionCOACH and VentureFin – who have helped develop a custom-made workshop series programme for applicants. Each workshop is tailor-made for the applicants with input from social entrepreneurs, serial entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and owners of companies who have done it themselves and know the challenges of setting up a business.

How many women are you currently working with and how have their businesses taken off since last year?

This year, registrations for Ro’Ya closed early after we hit our maximum capacity of 100 applicants.

We have been following up on our winners from last year’s programme and keeping track of their progress. First-prize winner, Nadia Wehbe, founder and owner of Baby Arabia has managed to expand her business by hiring more staff on board, and this enabled her to also expand her presence across more nurseries in Dubai.

Our second-prize winner, Isabelle Millasseau, founder and owner of Footup, has managed to use the prize money to develop and manufacture her product in a factory here in the UAE and also sell it in select stores across Dubai.

What forms of mentoring and coaching do you offer? Is it in all areas of business?

Yes, our mentoring and coaching sessions span all areas of business — from helping the applicants develop their unique value proposition, to understanding their financials, developing their branding and marketing strategy, maneuvering the legal landscape, and much more.

What happens when these ladies have set up a successful business, do you have any partnerships for mid-level funding to help these women grow their businesses?

Though this is not part of our plan at the moment, it is definitely something we aspire to build up to as we further develop the initiative. For DBWC and MasterCard, we do not see Ro’Ya as a one-off initiative, but rather we approach it as an ongoing effort to empower women in the UAE.

After the competition is over, we will continue to work very closely with the top winners, to provide professional guidance and relevant networking opportunities that will help kick-start their businesses and prepare them for long term-success.

How do initiatives such as this empower women and help push the start-up sector in the region?

According to figures from the Carnegie Endowment Centre, around 95 per cent of the private sector across the Middle East and Africa is made up of SMEs. At the moment, only a small percentage of these SMEs are owned by women. That said, there is strong evidence to show that women in Dubai are very interested in starting up their own businesses and have great ideas that they want to turn into a business. At the moment, research points to a lack of confidence, insufficient knowledge about the fundamentals of starting up a business and access to capital as some of the key challenges that are holding them back.

We believe that Ro’Ya helps address some of these fundamental challenges. The programme brings together aspiring and budding entrepreneurs, puts them through a series of educational workshops and trainings that are specific to entrepreneurship, provides them with access to a networking platform of likeminded women, and even helps fund certain projects. And all of this is provided at no cost to applicants.

The reputation and experience of DBWC and MasterCard is a key factor in ensuring the programme remains relevant to the community and beneficial to all applicants, while simultaneously driving the spirit of entrepreneurship in the UAE.