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Faisal Said Al Mutar (3:10)

My name is Faisal Said Al Mutar. I was born and raised in Iraq in the city of Babylon. Grew up in an academic family. My dad is a doctor, my mom is a lawyer, and I'm the failure. So the person who's giving a TED Talk here is the failure of the family. So I grew up in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Malaysia. And I've seen firsthand the cost of talent and the fact that they were forced to leave their homes. So the subject of lifting people up and the subject of international development is not just theoretical, academic subject for me, it's what I think about the whole time. As you probably know, the United States has spent trillions of dollars in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan only to replace Saddam Hussein with Iran and the Taliban with the Taliban. A greater type of investment, right? So I started looking, I started asking questions and I found that the current system of aid is filled with corruption, too many middlemen, too many gatekeepers, and the money hardly makes it to the people that intends to help. So the intention and the big picture is good. But to really actually get help is very difficult. And according to the World bank, it can cost up to $20,000 to create one job in international development. There is still better investment than Twitter or Theranos, but still that is a lot of money wasted. And, but we also found, and that's the good news is that almost half of the people in the region say that they intend to start a business in the next five years. That is millions of innovators, millions of entrepreneurs, millions of creatives who would have their skills wasted if we don't invest in them. So I start thinking about, what if we actually redefine the model of aid? What if we actually redefine the purpose of aid instead of just being a do good bureaucracy, to actually remove the barriers and define the purpose of aid as moving people towards normalcy, meaning moving people toward the world of supply and demand. And we did just that. So we made it very easy for people to actually get funds. And that's the process that we follow. And also to think about investment, we think about the one that can stimulate economic growth. And also to fight the corruption crisis, and I'll call it the corruption disease. In most of the Middle east, we actually make it one grant per one person. So in that way, there is little system of favoritism, little system of trying to choose people who are connected to the political elite and have it forward. So that being said, what we found was really amazing. We found that the moment we move people towards that, they're far more accountable to their own communities, not to us. This is a story of one of the great stories that we supported, which is a founder of Hakim. Hashem Hakim is the founder of Lego. He's in the city of Mosul, which used to be what ISIS declared this caliphate. And he founded a taxi female company. And now with $3,000, I kid you not, he now hires more than 57 people. So think about the return of investment. And he is not alone. He is actually one of 250 projects we supported. Hani Hamada is a Syrian refugee who lives in Turkey. Hani is a self learner. He learned Turkish and he was, you know what? I'm going to start a business that teaches Turkish to new immigrants. And then he built up a business and with the $3,000, he also now has 33 people staff. All of them are refugees teaching Turkish. So look at the new model. With $1 million, we were able to create 35,000 jobs. Compared to the old model that you can only create 50 jobs. So which investment is better? Okay, that's straightforward, right? And what's also amazing, after we actually tried that, we saw that the variation of this model is already being filled right now in Ukraine, in some parts of India, some parts of Africa. So we're not only ones doing it. And the lesson of my talk is aid doesn't have to be costly to be effective. You might actually be wondering right now, why am I talking about aid, development and innovation while the Middle east is at war right now? And the answer is the old methods and the past is actually what got us here. By focusing on the future, by focusing on innovation, entrepreneurship, I believe we can transform the region from a region that's filled with conflict and war to a region that people decide to stay and invest in, to invest in talent other than place that people escape. Thank you so much, ted. Thank you.

Elise Hu (7:39)

That was Faisal Saeed Al Matar at TED Next 2024. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more@ted.com curationguidelines and that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar and Tansika Sarmarnivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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