A look at Dubai’s new entrepreneurship hub

Youth Start-up

Student entrepreneurs are being given the support and training to turn ideas into successful ventures at GEMS World Academy – Dubai

GEMS World Academy – Dubai has launched The Hub, a central component of the school’s Centre of Excellence for Entrepreneurship and Youth Start-up. The Centre, which is the first of its kind in the education sector, seeks to foster an entrepreneurial mindset and drive innovation among students, leading to successful ventures and the creation of jobs.

The Hub is a key support platform designed to incubate the ideas of student entrepreneurs and provide support to make them reality. The Centre of Excellence also helps students to refine their projects, gain appropriate guidance and rapidly establish their enterprises in partnership with key industry leaders and with the support of the Centre’s entrepreneurship ecosystem partner, Wamda Ventures. The Centre provides training, facilitates access to experts, promotes peer-to-peer connections and provides resources to enable students to scale up and grow their business ideas, all while developing an entrepreneurial mindset.

The Centre of Excellence was inaugurated by GEMS Education CEO Dino Varkey, in the presence of leading influencer entrepreneurs in the UAE, including Anas Bukhash, co-founder of Ahdaaf Sports Club and the founder of Bukhash Brothers, and Zahra Abdullah, the food blogger behind “Cooking with Zahra”.

Today’s students are far more likely to have to create their own employment, while 65 per cent of the jobs they will engage in after they graduate do not even exist yet. With the current unemployment rate in the MENA region at about 28 per cent, it is even more important to enable the region’s youth to tap the potential of self-entrepreneurship.

Commenting on the launch of The Hub, Dino Varkey said: “The Hub is a crucial component of the school and is one of five Centres of Excellence across our network of schools. The Centre is designed to promote technological and digital learning as well as unique student pathways and qualifications. The Hub provides our bright young minds with a collaborative space to work on projects related to entrepreneurship, innovation and sustainable development.” Helen Al Uzaizi, GEMS World Academy – Dubai’s Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Environmentalism Director, said: “Students enter a continuously changing world that requires flexibility, creativity, collaboration and nimbleness to adapt to this rapid change. Increasingly, our students need to think like entrepreneurs, and our Centre of Excellence aims to break schools out of old dichotomies between knowledge and skills, traditional rigor and entrepreneurial creativity.

GEMS Education CEO Dino Varkey with students (top) and Helen Al Uzaizi, GWA Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Environmentalism Director, speaking at the launch

We want our students to be socially aware and responsible global citizens who understand local needs.”

During the launch event, GWA students presented ground-breaking innovations such as the WorkHub – a centre to upskill and re-integrate the unemployed and bring them back into the workforce. The event also featured a project named Axion Education, which is a solarpowered tablet with educational programmes and curriculums for use in impoverished areas by children who do not have access to schools. Revolutionary projects such as these were among the many on display at the launch, all aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 1 to end poverty in all its forms everywhere.