Ahmad Ramahi sounds like a lot of optimistic entrepreneurs: “That is the purpose of tech: to solve problems,” he says.
More than the gibberish-prone hype-beasts of Silicon Valley, Ramahi knows about real problems. He’s the founding CEO of WeDeliver, a service that combines gig-economy couriers with gig-economy distributors. Since debuting in January 2019, Ramahi says WeDeliver has taken on more than 450 couriers at more than 300 locations across Palestine, including East Jerusalem.
The company collects $85,000 in monthly revenue from nearly $3 million in orders. It plans to expand to Saudi Arabia in mid-April and break even by June—even amid the coronavirus pandemic. Ramahi is blunt about his circumstances: “Palestinians have a strange advantage here because the occupation means our lives are full of problems.”
Palestine, occupied by Israel’s military since 1967, has severely limited access to the world’s economy. Palestinian GDP per capita is $3,200 compared with more than $63,000 in the U.S. Economic restrictions—and therefore stability—shift frequently in Palestine, which is currently embroiled in a trade war with Israel and struggling with a lack of capital that the World Bank has described as happening within “an already strangled Palestinian economy.” In June, unemployment hit 15% in the West Bank and 47% in the Gaza Strip—the two regions that make up Palestine.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Israel has increased its restrictions on movement for Palestinians. With the global economy reeling from the devastation wrought by social distancing, curfews, quarantines, and other levels of lockdown, the world is getting a taste of what daily Palestinian life has been like for decades.
“Without occupation, the economy of the Occupied Palestinian Territory could produce twice the GDP it currently generates,” the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said in a report in 2016.
Palestinian entrepreneurs have nevertheless persisted in trying to make their digital desert bloom. Like other minor economies —Estonia, Hungary, the Philippines, and Vietnam—Palestine has focused on becoming a hub of outsourcing. When Israeli microchip designer Mellanox Technologies was acquired in a $6.8 billion takeover in March 2019 by U.S. supplier Nvidia, its 100-plus Palestinian engineers outsourced from Asal Technologies stood to earn a collective $3.5 million.
Additionally, as in Barcelona and Kigali, Rwanda, Palestine’s tech industry has positioned itself as a springboard into its broader developing region: the Arabic-speaking world, where people are far likelier to live in a Ramallah-like city of hardscrabble pluck than a Dubai-like one of gloss and glamour.
The opportunity is big, at least on paper. The 22-nation Arab League, of which Palestine is a part, is an informal economic bloc of $3 trillion—equal to the gross domestic product of India—with 450 million residents, roughly the same as that of the European Union.
Receet, a startup that makes software for keeping track of digital receipts, has no clients in Palestine despite being founded there. Since its launch in January, Receet has made its service available in stores in Amman, Jordan, and Dubai, and is eyeing expansion in the Saudi Arabian cities of Jedda and Riyadh. But the company operates under a corporate structure based in Delaware. “The world wants our solutions,” says Receet CEO Omar Barkawi. “But they do not always respond well to those solutions coming from Palestine.”
WeDeliver was the first startup accepted by Fikra—Arabic for “idea”— an incubator run by Paltel Group, a telecommunications company founded in 1995 that is now the largest private employer in Palestine. During the pandemic, business has boomed as people rely ever more on deliveries, sending revenue in March up 24% from February.
“We just need one undeniable, great success,” Ramahi says, “to make the world realize our worth as investments, even if they don’t always see our worth as people.” China had Alibaba. Sweden had Spotify. Estonia had Skype. And Israel had Waze. What does Palestine have?
Many Palestinian startups, in their ache to mirror Silicon Valley success, are derivative. Consider YamSafer, a travel portal whose potential diminished significantly after Western versions like Booking.com and TripAdvisor began operating in the Middle East. Mashvisor, a tool for evaluating the potential revenue from investment properties, made waves in 2016 when it became the first Palestinian startup to go through Silicon Valley’s 500 Startups seed accelerator. But the company has since lost some of its star power after governments started restricting how often homeowners can rent their property through services like Airbnb.
Palestinian tech’s beacon of hope is Rawabi, an affluent city being developed between Jerusalem and Nablus. At a recent count, it has just 5,000 residents of its planned 40,000 and is still essentially under construction. But Asal is based there, as are 20 other startups.
Rawabi’s founder, Bashar Masri, one of the richest men in Palestine, declined phone interviews, citing a distaste for them. But he is not shy—giving splashy sales pitches to the BBC and 60 Minutes, and, in 2018, developing a fellowship program with Harvard University’s school of public policy. Assuming smart cities are a good idea, Rawabi is a billion-dollar gamble of Palestinian ambition on a massive scale. But scale is not enough.
“Scale is only one answer, and it cannot always be the answer,” says WeDeliver’s Ramahi. “The next level is impact beyond scale. Local understanding. Local detail. I always laugh at Google’s directions from one town to another here. They don’t understand that this road is closed by checkpoints, or can only be used by Israelis. We Palestinians make our own roads. To be Palestinian is to be an entrepreneur, even about an act as basic as going for a walk.”
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