SOM boosts Middle East businesses

Fifteen entrepreneurs based in Yemen will spend two weeks as interns at local Dearborn businesses this October thanks to a partnership between the College of Business and the American-Arab Chamber of Commerce.

As part of the partnership, accounting Prof. Mohamed Bayou spent two weeks in Yemen earlier this year conducting two one-week seminars for 136 Yemeni entrepreneurs in Sana’a and Aden. Bayou was joined by two members of the American-Arab Chamber of Commerce, Ali Shami and Asmaa Jamil, who also taught some sessions.

“The number of participants was triple what we had expected,” according to Bayou. “We were able to reach out to many more people who clearly wanted to learn about how to start and grow a business.”

“There was a good mix of participants in each location, with roughly 35 percent of them being women, and a number of the participants came from more remote, rural areas,” according to Barbara Peitsch, the project’s director.

The seminar leaders selected 15 par­ticipants from the two seminars, based on the quality of their business plans, their attendance and their level of participation in the seminars, to spend two weeks in Dearborn in internships with local businesses.

The seminars and internships are supported by a $250,000 grant the School of Management received last fall from the U.S. Department of State to promote entrepreneurship in Yemen.

In addition to the work in Yemen, Bayou has provided leadership for the School of Man­agement project to upgrade business and eco­nomics education at the University of Garyounis in Benghazi, Libya. The three-year pro­gram is sponsored by the U.S. Agency for Internation­al Development (USAID), the U.S. Department of State’s Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), and Higher Education for Development (HED), a Washington based non-governmental organization. Bayou grew up in Benghazi and attended the University of Garyounis as an undergraduate. He traveled to Libya in July to assess the curriculum and meet with local stakeholders.

Bayou plans to spend the winter semes­ter in Libya teaching accounting and working with junior and senior faculty to develop their teaching and research capabilities. Many more exchanges are planned in both directions over the next two and a half years.