Youth Of Mount Lebanon Start Up New Businesses / Lebanon

—

“Our idea project ‘Hummus Cups’ has the potential to go global. Our group is aiming high and the Youth Entrepreneurs’ project has offered great support. Now that we won the competition, we will buy the needed equipment and hire the essential staff in order to launch our business,” said 29-year-old Samer Sfeir.

Samer and his partners Elie Matta and Chantalle Saade, won a grant worth USD 15,000 through the Mount Lebanon Youth Entrepreneurs project implemented jointly by Berytech and the Knowledge Development Company (KDC) within the framework of the “Lebanon Host Communities Support Project” (LHSP).

“The training sessions, especially the competition, motivated us to work really hard to meet the deadlines. We did not want to miss the opportunity to turn our idea into a professional business plan. We wanted to make the best out of it,” Samer added.

Fifty young entrepreneurs participated in training sessions conducted at the beginning of the project focusing on pitching business ideas and improving business plans. At the end of the training a competition was launched and ten entrepreneur groups were selected to pitch their creative business ideas to a panel of experts on March 22, 2016. “Hummus Cups” is one of the four innovative business ideas that won. The team will launch their business in 2016 in which it will offer customers a pre-packaged hummus dip with bread sticks: an easy-to-grab snack that transforms a traditional ethnic dish into a healthy grab-and-go snack.

“ ’Hummus Cups’ will provide new opportunities for vulnerable Lebanese women, who will prepare the hummus dip, this is the added value of our project,” said Chantalle Saade.

Another winner was ‘The Mason’. ‘The Mason’ is an engineering game for all ages. It is a new concept of interactive games that duplicate the real life process of construction through a miniature building set containing construction blocks with mini bricks, cement, sand, steel and wood,” said 23-year-old Elias Chemaly.

“We are confident that the game will be successful. We are planning to launch our start-up before the end of this year,” he said.

“Participating in this project was very important to us. Lebanese youth need a lot of financial and technical support in order to launch a business or find a decent job given the hard economic situation,” Chemaly explained.

The Lebanon Youth Entrepreneurs Project aims to support the youth in Mount Lebanon in establishing innovative start-up ideas, with an overall objective of spurring a sense of local entrepreneurship, expanding income opportunities for the youth, and boosting local economic activities. It hopes to address the challenges faced by Lebanon, in light of the Syria crisis, particularly in the most vulnerable host communities.

The project is funded by the Regional Development and Protection Programme (RDPP), which is led by Denmark through a generous contribution from the European Union, Ireland, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Czeck Republic and implemented within LHSP which is a multi-donor joint project between the Ministry of Social Affairs and the UNDP.

Highlight

• “Hummus Cups’ will provide new opportunities for vulnerable Lebanese women, who will prepare the hummus dip, this is the added value of our project,” said Chantalle Saade.