JEDDAH, 2 March 2006 — The Abdul Latif Jameel Community Services Programs took part in the 21st Janadriya Festival. The annual event attracts a large number of charitable institutions and professional organizations in the Kingdom.
An estimated 3,000 people, including officials from the Ministry of Labor and the Human Resources Development Fund, visited the ALJ booth located near the southern main gate of the festival grounds.
The Community Services Programs are the philanthropic division of the Abdul Latif Jameel Co. Ltd., which is a conglomerate that includes the exclusive vendor of Toyota vehicles in the Kingdom. The company’s community service efforts include job training and placement for Saudi nationals as part of the Kingdom’s efforts to replace foreign skilled workers with Saudis.
The ALJ booth included multimedia presentations and leaflets describing the organization’s many community-oriented programs. The booth also received a number of applications from students interested in joining the program for training, searching jobs or seeking funds for small projects.
Sami Al-Enzy, a general manager of the organization, said that this was the second appearance by the Community Services Programs at the 21-year-old festival. ALJ’s presence at the festival was an opportunity to promote the goodwill activities to the Saudi people.
The programs include charity projects as well as job-placement initiatives. The organization also offers small-business development loans of between SR10,000 and SR100,000 to young Saudi entrepreneurs, including women.
The president of ALJ Co. Ltd., Mohammed Jameel, donated funds for the creation of three major endowments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Poverty Action Lab, in the university’s Department of Economics. The endowments, announced in October, create a professorship, two fellowships and a research and teaching fund that aims to study ways to alleviate global poverty.
