So where do you go when you want to find out information about creative and bright young minds from the region? Your best bet is Google (or any other search engine). But I managed to find two very busy entrepreneurs that are hoping to change all of that, Sana Mahmoud along with her partner have recently launched a portal called Qa2ed.com (Qa2ed which translates to Leader).
The portal which is still in Beta and in Arabic only hopes to achieve finding and identifying the new leaders of tomorrow. Whether they be political, artistic, professional or even cultural leaders, Qa2ed.com would like to add them on their portal and become the first pool of knowledge about individuals in the region making a difference. The reason Sana finds this as an important issue is because:
- There are a great number of personalities that aren’t getting the respect they deserve
- A large percentage of the population don’t really know any of the modern day leaders in the region
- Its very difficult to find any information on modern day leaders and thinkers
- Lack of useful Arabic content on the web
Currently they’ve managed to collect over 1,400 individuals and articles about them. The majority of the individuals are from Eypgt, Syria and Palestine. Registered users of the site can refer or suggest people to be added as leaders, then the team from Qa2ed will get in touch and verify the information.
The site has a great deal of content about the leaders, users can even carry out campaigns in support or opposition of a certain individual where they can urge fellow users of the site to add their opinions about the leader.
In my meeting with Sana, she mentioned that they would like to move away from historical figures because information about them is found in abundance, and she would like to focus on the youth who are still not in the limelight. She also pointed out that another area of interest is in research, apparently all the universities in the region don’t add their research and findings online all of it is left in the libraries in the forms of books and journals, she would like one day to have all this content and the authors acredited on Qa2ed.com.
We’d like to thank Sana for her time, and wish her the best of luck with this very informative initiative.