[ilianam]

Thanks so much for sharing this perspective! I'm Manara's Co-Founder and CEO. I wish that we could tackle all these communities at once because you're right - there's undiscovered talent in many underserved communities and everyone (them, employers, society) would benefit from bridging the small gap they're facing to world-class employment.

We chose to focus on MENA for a few reasons. First, it's the region that we know best and can therefore be competitive in.

Second, it truly is a large, exceptional pool of diverse STEM talent - it will soon be as many STEM grads as Eastern Europe (and more than half of them are women!)

Third, we can scale our impact by building a brand for this talent pool & referral networks. Similar to what happened in Eastern Europe.

Finally, our focus helps to attract precisely the resource we need to fulfill our mission: highly talented engineers from top tech companies around the world. Some are alumni, most are currently volunteers who care about MENA. They volunteer to do mock interviews, mentor the participants, etc. We could never do this without them.

My co-founder Laila (who is from Gaza, and like Dalia, made it to Silicon Valley... but back in 2016) and I are both passionate about untapping human potential. While we can't tackle all underserved communities at once, we are actively sharing lessons learned with organizations doing similar things in other regions. :)

[sudosteph]

Thanks for responding! It absolutely makes sense that Manara is targeting a specific talent pool in order to leverage the founders' personal skills, experiences and connections. If anything, targeting the entire MENA region seems like incredibly ambitious undertaking on it's own. I certainly didn't intend to imply that the burden to serve those other communities in similar ways should fall on Manara in particular!

Rather, I think everyone who cares about those communities I mentioned should be paying very close attention the work you're doing, and the exceptional results you're seeing. The fact that you are already sharing those lessons with other regions - well, that just gives me another reason to keep cheering you on. Wishing you all the best!