Asharqia Chamber and in cooperation with the Aramco Center for Entrepreneurship (Waed) held an awareness workshop on the program at the Chamber's headquarter on Thursday 21 March 2019, with the presence of the Director of Loans Department at the Center, Mazen bin Abdullah Al-Asnaj.
The Chamber's board member Ibrahim bin Mohammed al-Sheikh, the Chairman of the Industry and Energy Committee, said that the workshop aims at introducing the role of the program in supporting and developing local content through enabling entrepreneurs to establish and expand their enterprises through various financing and training programs.
Al-Shaikh said that the programs of supporting and motivating entrepreneurship are witnessing great interest by the wise leadership, which placed it at the top of the objectives of Vision 2030, which represented a new starting point in the development and sustainability of the national economy and encouraged the launching and support of programs of all kinds.
Al-Shaikh noted that Waed program, which was launched by Aramco for more than eight years to encourage entrepreneurship among individuals and support local investors, comes in line with our national options towards a diversified economy based on knowledge and depends on innovation and technology.
Therefore, Asharqia Chamber holds this workshop, in cooperation with the program (Waed), because it recognizes the importance of raising the awareness of the business sector from the people of the region with the programs it provides, whether those related to financing or incubation and business development.
For his part, Al-Asanj said that Aramco launched in 2011 "Waed initiative" after realizing the urgent need to three things: the first is to focus on projects of a technical and innovative, where it will turn the creative ideas into successful projects benefiting from the expertise of Saudi Aramco in this area.
The second is to diversify the national economy by supporting high value-added projects in different and new sectors.
He added, "we seek to create sustainable, scalable small and medium sized enterprises, create an environment conducive to innovation and creativity."
The third is to develop the entrepreneurial environment to motivate young men and women to enter the field and become successful entrepreneurs through providing them with services that promote entrepreneurship.
He pointed out that the characteristics of the projects supported by Waed are projects that provide a large number of lucrative employment opportunities for young people, which is based on creative and innovative ideas, and projects interested in localization of industries that decreased our dependence on imports, projects that transfer knowledge and technology to our country, projects in support of developing regions in the Kingdom, or those interested in economic diversification.
Al-Asnaj said that Waed has prepared the funding for 114 establishments in various sectors such as information technology, vocational and health education, and other service and industrial fields. The volume of this funding was more than $ 112 million.
He pointed out that these facilities and other facilities that will be funded later will contribute positively to increase the value added of the national economy.
These facilities are expected to contribute more than 2,000 unique job opportunities for the young people of this country.
In our early years, we focused on the Eastern Region, and then will be expanded to the rest of the Kingdom such as Khamis Mushait, Asir, Jouf, Jizan and Hail.
The program also supported 50 industrial projects and industrial service facilities.
The workshop comes within the framework of the joint efforts between Asharqia Chamber and Aramco Center for Entrepreneurship (Waed) in order to raise the awareness of the business sector in the region with the programs offered by the Center and ways to communicate with him.
In conclusion, Al-Sheikh, honored the guest speaker, Al-Asanj, with a commemorative shield.
