My name is Faisal Saeed Al Mutar. I was born and raised in Iraq, in the city of Babylon. I grew up in an academic family. My dad is a doctor and my mom is a lawyer. And I'm the failure. So the person who is giving a TED talk here is the failure of the family.
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 [a] 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 great return 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 it 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 dollars to create one job in international development. That is still a better investment than Twitter or Theranos, but still, that is a lot of money wasted. And what 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 started thinking about what if we actually redefine the model of aid? What if we actually redefine the purpose of aid and 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 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 moved people towards that, they are 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 Hakam Hesham, the founder of Lygo. He is in the city of Mosul, which used to be what ISIS declared as caliphate. And he founded a [female taxi] company. And now with 3,000 dollars, 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. Here is Hani Hamade, a Syrian refugee who lives in Turkey. Hani is a self-learner. He learned Turkish and he was like, 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 3,000 dollars he also now has 33 people staff, all of them are refugees teaching Turkish.
So look at the new model. With one million dollars, 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? That's like, straightforward, right?
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And what's also amazing after we actually tried that, we saw that the variation of this model is already being followed right now in Ukraine, in some parts of India, some parts of Africa. So we're not the 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 and entrepreneurship, I believe we can transform the region from a region that is 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.
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