JEDDAH, 9 May 2007 — Dar Al-Hekma College is for the first time holding an event entitled the Women’s Entrepreneurship Training Workshop in the last week of May to guide both businesswomen and other aspiring women who wish to start their own businesses.
Speakers at the workshop, which will tentatively take place on May 27-28, include members of the Women Presidents’ Organization (WPO) in the United States, who own multimillion-dollar businesses. This is the first time such a workshop is being held at Dar Al-Hekma.
“The distinction in this workshop is that the participants are not commercial women who are doing their businesses for a living. They are the CEOs of their own companies,” said Saliha Abedin, vice dean of institutional advancement at Dar Al-Hekma.
“Each one of them has expertise in her own area and specialty, and will share it in an instructive way. It won’t be like a panel discussion. It will be a high caliber workshop,” she said.
Speakers of the WPO are Erica Whitlinger, co-founder of The ReFirement Group, Sherri Orlowitz, founder of Shan Industries, Carrine Reilly, partner at Henry, Held & Reilly and LLP, and Debra Murray, president and managing member of Blue Spring International.
The workshop will test whether the participants have the right characteristics to be businesswomen.
It will then move to discuss practical self-development issues of how to write business letters and loan proposals, how to finance one’s business and other issues that would assist women in owning and running their businesses everywhere, not just in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi speaker that is set to lecture at the workshop is Nadia Baeshen, general manager of the corporate social responsibility department at Dallah Albaraka Group. The participation of other local speakers is not finalized yet.
The workshop is open to everyone, but the seats are limited to 40 but are likely to be increased to not more than 50.
“It will be a unique opportunity to discuss human resources and marketing as well as the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements and how they affected Saudi Arabia and women in business,” said Abedin.
The American speakers will share technical expertise while Saudi women will provide information about local expertise. “The workshop is intensive and I expect that women attendees will finish the workshop and utilize the skills they learned to launch, run and upgrade a business,” Abedin added.
Registration forms are available at the college and can be available by e-mail upon request. Participants will receive certificates of attendance from Women Presidents’ Organization.
