ilianam

Thanks so much for the shout out! We believe that the concept of "undiscovered talent" should be eliminated globally - and that this region in particular has been overlooked for too long. In Palestine for example, 52% of computer scientists are women, but 83% of them are unemployed.

Running a startup with a social impact mission is a dream come true. I hope more people will launch businesses aiming to solve important challenges. Our world needs the creativity, talent, hustle, and funding that are so easy to find in startup communities.

Yup! In Palestine 52% of CS students are women. In Tunisia 62%. In Qatar 80%. This is one of the main reasons Laila and I decided to launch Manara. :) Our 5th cohort (the one after Dalia's... they're just starting to hunt for internships & jobs now) is 100% women by the way! They're a mix of interns, junior engineers, and mid-level engineers.

A bit of our story in case it's interesting: I was working at Upwork with an engineering team that could hire talent from anywhere in the world... and still our engineers were almost all men from Eastern Europe. I loved them but also missed having a more diverse team and worried that our company wasn't going to be competitive... diverse teams usually outperform non-diverse was, and for a company like Upwork, being familiar with users around the world is critical.

I had met Laila in Gaza. Like Dalia, she studied computer engineering there. She moved to Silicon Valley in 2016.

In 2017 (or was it 2018? hard to remember now) we started working nights and weekends on what we thought would be an all-volunteer side project to connect the talent we knew from Palestine to employers in Silicon Valley. Already in our 2nd cohort someone got into Google. That's when we realized we had created something that worked. Last October we couldn't keep up with helping Cohort #4 search for internships & jobs (that's the one Dalia was in) and training Cohort #5 so I took the plunge and started working on Manara full-time. :)

How did you bomb that first internship? I wonder if there's a useful lesson to share here with Dalia and our broader community.

Moving to the United States is almost impossible for junior engineers from the Middle East. They can relocate to Europe quite easily though. Dalia is going to relocate to Germany or Poland.

They can come to the USA for an internship quite easily on a J-1 visa, but they won't be able to stay easily once you want to hire them full-time.

Have you considered remote work or opening an office in Europe? Feel free to contact us at www.manara.tech/hire-engineers and we can set up a call.

Love this! I'm Manara's co-founder and CEO. One of the things we hear from people like Dalia is how much they LOVE getting mock interviews & mentorship from people who work at Google, Netflix, Amazon, Wayfair, Spotify, Twitter, etc. Over and over again they say, "I thought you had to be a genius to work there, but after meeting these people, I feel like I could do it too."

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. :)

Manara's Polish-American co-founder catching up late here to say I never tried that ice cream, but I do recommend eating knafeh in the West Bank and fattet hummus in Gaza! The food in in West Bank vs Gaza is quite different... I think Gaza is particularly good... but unfortunately it's almost impossible to get there unless you're a humanitarian worker or a journalist.

NOTE: if you work in tech and want to mentor in Palestine, check out Gaza Sky Geeks and Code for Palestine. They organize on-site travel for select volunteers (full transparency: I'm involved with both organizations)

Hi all, jumping in here as the CEO and co-founder of Manara just to say that all the Palestinians that Repl.it interviewed came from Manara (I think). We have in place a very intense vetting system and a training program to teach these CS grads how to interview effectively. At Google our referral-to-hire rate is 67%. That probably explains this experience.

The talent in the Middle East & North Africa is very strong. We believe it's the next Eastern Europe, which used to export refugees and is now a hub of world-class talent.

Love your handle :)

Laila has been in back-to-back calls since she posted this (thanks to everyone who filled out the form & booked a meeting with her!) so I'll share what I know on this topic.

The high proportion of women studying STEM is definitely not a reflection of men not being interested in these fields. Engineering of all types are admired in the region, and computer science has gained traction in the past 5 years. There's increasing participation in competitive programming competitions... and that's mostly men so far.

Until about 5 years ago both men and women in Palestine were pressured by their parents to study medicine. That has changed because people have become aware of the opportunities in the tech sector and the unemployment facing all other fields. There's an exam you have to take at the end of high school in Palestine called "tawjihi"... it's similar to the A-levels in the UK or the matural in Poland, closest equivalent in the USA would be the SATs. At one university I know of in Palestine, 5 years ago a "tawjihi" score of 78 could allow you to study computer science. Now it's 92+. So it's a more in-demand field amongst both mena and women. (That's one reason it makes sense to start Manara now: the pool of super smart talent in computer science is growing quickly.)

As for why women study STEM and do so well in it... Laila always tells me that it was so normal to her that she didn’t really think about it. Women studied Physics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, etc at high rates. I remember telling a woman in Gaza once about the stereotype that we have in the United States that men are better than women in these areas, and her response was, "Are you kidding? We all know women are super stars in those fields."

The fact that women do well in STEM starts off early: it's the only region in the world where girls outperform boys in high school math (and again, not because the boys are underperforming).

I have a hypothesis for this but it’s really just a wild guess. I ran across one study in the USA in which middle school girls’ math scores improved dramatically & quickly as soon as their math classes were separated by gender (i.e., girls did better when studying this subject with just other girls). In countries like Palestine most elementary, middle, and high schools are separate for girls and boys, so that might be a part of the reason for girls' confidence...

Gotcha. Sounds like an interesting life. :)

Thanks for sharing that. It is indeed really hard - and as startup founders, we understand! Just wanted to clarify that many of our engineers do want to work on startups with interesting missions… what matters most ultimately to them (and to us) is the team they’ll work with and the experience they'll get.

Laila is personally meeting with all of our potential new partners because we really care about understanding your customers’ needs & making sure that our solution addresses them. Will be interesting for you to discuss this with her. (Assuming you booked a call? You should have received an invite after you filled out the form.)

This is reassuring, thank you! Also probably clarifies why we hadn't heard of him. :)