Entrepreneurship in Iraq

Patricia is the co-founder and Director of Operations of Five One Labs. Her main interest is Middle East politics and she has traveled extensively throughout the region for both work and academic research.

Prior to Five One Labs, Patricia worked as a Middle East political risk analyst with a focus on Iraq and North Africa for the Dubai office of consultancy Control Risks. She is also a volunteer facilitator for the Soliya Connect Program.

She obtained her Master of Public Administration degree in Economic Development from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, where she concentrated in economic and political development, and her BA in International Relations and Economics from Tufts University.

We are committed to solving the livelihoods challenges facing post-conflict youth, be they refugees, IDPs and host community members from across Iraq and Syria who are struggling to rebuild their lives. Our organization is a startup incubator in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq that equips displaced and conflict-affect youth with the tools to rebuild their lives with dignity. 

Our program improves the lives of our target population in several ways. First, an incubator cultivates the resourcefulness and creativity of refugees by providing the skills necessary to take an idea and turn it into a scalable business. Second, mentorship helps them receive guidance to navigate a new market. Finally, seed funding provides them with an ability to access financing that may not be otherwise available.  

Stimulating job creation through entrepreneurship through our incubator elevates these young entrepreneurs by enabling them to create sustainable livelihoods in their new communities.

Displaced individuals face challenges to rebuilding, including legal limitations on the right to work, lack of access to capital or local networks, and bias from host community members, who feel that newcomers place a burden on already scarce resources. In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), where we currently operate, refugees and internally-displaced people face a unique context relative to that of displaced individuals across the Middle East. 

To provide context from a bird’s-eye level, the KRI is home to 250,000 Syrian refugees and over one million internally displaced Iraqis. A recent Kurdistan Regional Government study showed that 80% of refugees are employed in the region’s capital but primarily in the service/food industries. The main group of unemployed refugees are those with university degrees, as skilled positions are subject to the most bias or skills mismatch. Syrian women are also highly under-employed, with less than 8% in the workforce. What this means on a more personal level is that there is a willingness and desire to engage in dignified work, but the supply of jobs is not there or legal obstacles make it challenging to work.

Our project is a startup incubator that provides young entrepreneurs with the support they need to launch and grow their businesses. They come to us with a business idea, like an e-commerce website or an education tech platform, and spend three months full-time receiving intensive training in business, design thinking and leadership skills; mentorship from world-class mentors; access to our coworking space; prototyping support; and the opportunity to receive seed funding in the form of a grant at the end of the program. 

Our model ensures that the entrepreneurs are going through an experiential learning process so that they receive as much practical experience as possible to launch their businesses and become effective leaders and managers. By the end of the program, we aim for the entrepreneurs to have a full business plan, a prototype of their product and their first customers.

A key element of the incubator program is the fact that it brings together entrepreneurs from Iraq’s diverse communities, be they Syrian refugees who have recently arrived, internally displaced Iraqis, or local Kurds. We aim for each cohort to be 50% displaced and 50% local, with an even split between women and men entrepreneurs.

Empathy is at the core of our innovation, so we ensure that our “user” - our community members - are at the center of everything that we do so that we can develop programs based on their needs.

The community that we work with and in are an amazing group of diverse individuals. They are aspiring and successful entrepreneurs who are locals from Kurdistan, refugees from Syria and displaced individuals Iraq. Our entrepreneurs are people like Znara, an artist from Syria who fled to Erbil and is launching an art academy for children, and Ameen, an entrepreneur from Mosul who is building a pharmacy application to simplify the process of obtaining prescriptions.  

When we develop our programs, we seek feedback from our entrepreneurs, and have iterated on our incubator program each time we run it (five cohorts to date!) to tailor it to the needs of that given group. For example, when developing our first fully tech incubator program, we spent months interviewing tech entrepreneurs across the country to understand their challenges. When we learned that it was challenging to find talented developers, we hired a tech advisor to support the founders with this over the course of the program.

We strongly believe in the benefits of integrating refugees into the local economy so they can have sustainable and meaningful livelihoods, and by doing so, we are elevating opportunities for certain individuals who are traditionally left behind. While refugees may be seen by the host communities as burdens, encouraging entrepreneurship shows that refugees, with their skills and resilience, can be economic assets.

Our model generates impact by boosting local economies through job creation and refugee integration; developing entrepreneurial ecosystems to make it easier to start businesses; and creating inclusive cohorts with refugees and host community members to combat tension.

The idea for Five One was sparked nearly five  years ago when Alice Bosley, one of Five One’s co-founders, was working at UNHCR Innovation, an office that developed innovations for humanitarian challenges.  While the work was exciting, Alice realized that they rarely developed innovations that empowered the very communities they were working for, despite the daily reminders of their resourcefulness and resilience. Alice left UNHCR because she was passionate about supporting the entrepreneurial spirit of displaced individuals, and enrolled at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).

There Alice met her two co-founders, Patricia and Sophia, and the three then used their combined interest and skills to pilot Five One Labs. With Alice’s knowledge of refugee issues and her background in design thinking, Patricia’s background in Middle East politics and Sophia’s expertise in women’s issues, they submitted an application for SIPA’s Dean’s Public Policy Challenge Grant. They spent the year researching incubator models, interviewing the community, and piloted the model in a hybrid in-person/remote method to test their assumptions. After coming in first place, the team used the $15,000 in seed funding to continue their research, register the non-profit and continue testing their idea in the KRI.

Responses from both co-founders

Patricia Letayf: While my long-time interest in Middle East politics has meant that I have kept a close eye on displacement in the region, I also feel connected to the conflict for personal reasons. Over 30 years ago, my parents fled the Lebanese civil war for safety in the US. Now nearly all of my relatives living in Syria have been similarly affected and have left their homes to seek refuge. I am motivated to help find a sustainable long-term solution to the displacement crisis affecting millions in the Middle East. 

Alice Bosley: My family was in Riyadh in 2003 when bombs went off across the city, and I experienced firsthand the fear of not knowing whether loved ones are safe. From then on, it was hard to convince myself that conflict only happened to ‘other people.’ I became passionate about humanitarian work but realized it was the people themselves that mattered the most to me. There is inequity in the support provided to innovators in communities that need it the most, and I want to fix that.

We are fortunate to have a team of 16 people in two cities that are experts in entrepreneurship, design thinking, humanitarian innovation, marketing, design and event management who have worked both in the private sector and with humanitarian and development organizations. Our diverse team comes from across Iraq and Syria, represents the community of entrepreneurs that we work with and speaks all of their local languages, which means we have been able to run programs in English, Arabic and Kurdish, thereby serving all members of our community. 

Our alumni entrepreneurs serve as mentors and advisors for our cohorts, which means we can take advantage of the real-world experience of Kurdistan’s first tech founders to support our aspiring entrepreneurs. Our team members who have worked in the private sector have also been able to draw upon their networks to prove hands-on support for our founders through mentorship from the local business community. 

We face regular political and operational challenges working in Iraq, and being in the country for the past three years has truly tested our ability to overcome adversity. For example, within our first few weeks in country, tensions between the regional and federal governments escalated following a local independence referendum. International flights to airports in Kurdistan were halted for six months, preventing our team from entering and exiting. Additionally, money transfers were stopped, causing payment delays and limiting our ability to move money, and the Iraqi army re-took disputed territories, causing road blockages. Through these experiences we still launched our first incubator and learned about the importance of always having a plan B, being flexible, and regularly consulting others for advice. 

As our organization has grown to a team of 16 people working across two cities in Iraq, we have faced a number of obstacles relating to the challenging business and political environment of the country. One additional important lesson we have learned throughout this process is the importance of having a mission- and values-driven team to work with, as this commitment to our mission of working with conflict-affected youth to ensure their success has kept us motivated.

Dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak in Iraq put to the test our leadership ability. How could we best ensure that we could continue to serve our entrepreneurs, meet the obligations to our donors, all while - most importantly - ensuring the safety, health and well-being of our team?

We were in the middle of our first Arabic-language incubator program when the pandemic hit, and what we immediately did was to convene a meeting of our two cities’ managers so that they could give an update, based on their perspective, of what the situation was like for each of their team members. Based on this, we deferred to the experience and knowledge of our Startup Support team, who best understood the needs of the entrepreneurs, and moved all of our programs online.

Throughout the process we are leading and adapting based on how our team has been feeling and handling the situation on a given day. We have offered flexible work hours to our staff members with children; took our team on a virtual “retreat” so that we could have some collective down time; and we regularly play games and have team competitions to keep up the morale of the team.