Everyone

Wael Abed

Ice Cream Sandwich

About Us 
RiTS is an Iraqi innovative company with deep local and international experiences in business management, IT and capacity building. We present Noah’s Ark© to the people of Iraq as a humble initiative to institutionalize the creation of new work opportunities in the Iraqi private sector. We achieve this through concentrated efforts to nurture entrepreneurship among Iraqi youth. We focus our efforts on university graduates in particular. We work outside the norms of “official” Iraq. We are independent from government, political parties, and business councils. We have no financial backing from any public or private sector sources from inside or outside Iraq. But we make up for poor funding with tons of enthusiasm and rock solid determination to succeed in achieving the Ark’s goals.

What is Noah’s Ark©?

There are around 450,000 new youth entrants to the Iraqi job market every year. This includes 120,000 graduates.

Government statistics tell us the unemployment is running at 35% among the youth groups. Experts put it at 50-60%. Therefore there is a gap in work opportunities of the order 270,000. In view the widespread corruption, flight of Iraqi capital, and lack of meaningful economic policies, it is quite difficult to close this gap in available work opportunities. Our Noah’s Ark initiative is geared to help create work opportunities on large scale through supporting large numbers of startup entrepreneurial projects. The Ark uses a number of functions to achieve its goal including educating in entrepreneurship (Iraqis became accustomed to the nanny state), nurturing startups through incubators, enabling social media interaction along crowdsourcing principles to bring in helpful participation from migrant Iraqis. These and a few other functions enable the Ark to reach its stated goal.

© Noah’s Ark Functionality

The primary target for the Ark are male and female entrepreneurs. We focus on university graduates. However having a degree is not a condition of membership. More importantly we find people who test positive as having entrepreneurial tendencies. This is an important aspect, because those who are not naturally entrepreneurial will suffer greatly in trying to run a startup in the tough Iraqi business environment.

In their first days and weeks the entrepreneur will attend at the “Entrepreneur’s Café” where they will undergo an educational process about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. Should he/she not have a project idea in mind, they will find material parading projects launched by other Iraqi, regional and world entrepreneurs. As a successful project is usually one that solves a problem, we will with the aid of the crowdsource create a list of Iraq’s many problems to consider while looking for a project idea. Moreover we encourage our entrepreneurs to work in teams where possible because teams have a better chance to overcome obstacles and solve project problems.

Having picked a project idea, the project should be listed on the Ark. Now the crowdsource will go to work by engaging the entrepreneur with discussions both technical and business. Mentors, potential investors, customers, etc will all come forward to discuss the project idea and offer advice and guidance. These discussions can be private or public.


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