Entrepreneurs play a vital role in the MENA region’s economies. They boost growth, create jobs, and drive innovation. The entrepreneurial scene in the MENA region is growing, where startups are becoming ever so prevalent, despite the fact that entrepreneurship can be considered to be extremely challenging and risky.

So, what propels entrepreneurs to follow such a career path? What challenges do they face? And how do they overcome them? How difficult is it to set up a company in the MENA? Are entrepreneurs getting the support they need?

This report will give you a comprehensive idea of how entrepreneurship in the Middle East works and what the ‘key to success’ is to make your entrepreneurship journey a prosperous one.

Key findings:

• About two-third (67%) of respondents claimed they would prefer to be self-employed. On the other hand, 24% claimed they would prefer to seek employment in a company.
• ‘Personal fulfillment’ (47%) and ‘freedom to choose work-life balance’ (43%) emerge as the top reasons for preferring to be self-employed. ‘Be my own boss’, ‘ability to give back to the community’ and ‘higher monetary gains’ follow.
• The most appealing industries for entrepreneurship are considered to be IT/ Internet/ Ecommerce (10%), Commerce/ Trade/ Retail (9%) followed by Real Estate/ Property Development (8%) and Consumer Goods/ FMCG (8%).
• Over a quarter of respondents believed that innovation is the ‘key to success’ as an entrepreneur (28%), followed by being close to clients or customers (22%).

Data for the Entrepreneurship in the Middle East and North Africa 2019 was collected online from May 16 to 27, 2019. Results are based on a sample of 3,331 respondents from the following countries: UAE, KSA, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, and others.