This week’s Entrepreneur of the Week, Farida Frederika El Agamy, general manager of the Tharawat Family Business Forum, shines a spotlight on the importance of family businesses in the regional economy.
Having been dedicated to raising awareness around family businesses in the Middle East for quite a few years, El Agamy has decided to give families in business a place to co-create projects, learn about innovation, and become part of a knowledge hub on various matter relating to family businesses.
The Tharawat Space, launched at Al Serkal Avenue (Unit 19) in Al Quoz yesterday, is the region’s first co-working and events space for family businesses.
“Our vision is centred around empowering the sustainability, innovation and growth of family businesses in the MENA region,” says El Agamy about the Tharawat Forum’s work on building a strong community of like-minded business families which is aimed at enabling peer-to-peer exchange among some of the region’s most important companies.
With over 90 percent of the private sector in the Arab world composed of family-owned companies and 80 percent of non-oil GDP created by these firms, their importance cannot be underlined enough, she explains.
Until recently, the concept of family business was misunderstood by many claiming that it encouraged nepotism or involved only businesses of a smaller size, she adds. Therefore, when she helped her father to build the Tharawat Family Business Forum a few years back, it was work that centred around arduous content creation for a field that was still virtually unexplored in the region.
However, as interest and research started focusing on multi-generational businesses, family-ownership has increasingly come to the fore as an important factor accounting for these companies’ continuity and innovation.
In collaboration with local family businesses, the Tharawat Family Business Forum created a platform that allows families in business to work with and support each other.
“We are constantly looking for new ways to stimulate the next generation, inform and support the current leadership, and make the community more aware of what key role the family businesses play in everyone’s day-to-day lives,” El Agamy adds.
“It can be of great importance for a family business member to find a place to bounce ideas off others that are in a similar position. Our space will do that for them and hopefully become a center for business creativity.”
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