From green initiatives to never-had-a-bank-account solutions, these unique products and services will give you glimpse of into the future of the Middle East. Creation always outpaces destruction.
This green, social initiative from Lebanon uses untouched leftover food from restaurants to compost for fertilizer, sorting organic waste into recycling.
In a region where recycling is widely viewed as a foreign concept, this nonprofit organization seeks to jump start a local movement by employing people on site to separate waste into recycling, which reduces the cost of post-collection garbage sorting. Even if you have no clue about the effects of recycling or compositing on our bodies and the environment, the website has a nice diagram that illuminates how much clean air we will finally breathe, reduce pesticide use and deposit nutrients into our earth to give us back better quality grub.
Having the luxury to shop online can be a major hassle for the 73 percent of Jordanians who don’t have a credit card . And for those who do have bank accounts, hidden shipment costs that pop up upon delivery can be a slap to your wallet. Enter CashBasha, a website that allows you to search through Amazon, buy a product and pay cash upon delivery or through an affiliate supermarket using a coupon. CashBasha’s focus on people getting the exact total cost upon purchase creates a transparent marketplace that may just revolutionize online consumer-ship using cash for Jordan and the MENA region.
The low quality of tertiary education and outdated merit systems in universities are a major struggle for many Arabs especially in Egypt and Jordan, according to Venture Magazine. To confront the abysmal situation, the Queen Rania Foundation initiated Edraak.com to introduce a massive open online course (MOOC) in Arabic provided by leading academic institutions such as AUB, MITx, and Harvardx, and all for FREE. Now you don’t have wait to receive a good education, you can go get it yourself online. Study up people!
Technically dubbed as "MENA’s e-commerce solution", ShopGo has reason to show its tech muscles when it assisted in setting up online shops for 12 businesses in the first week of its launch . For small to medium-sized enterprises and start-ups who want to sell goods online for an affordable price, ShopGo offers website creation as well as handling logistics and language barriers online. Mo Ghashim, founder of ShopGo wants his users to think of the websites the businesses create as a “product, not a page”.
No longer do swimmers have to guess if last night’s Ma2loobeh has affected their swim meet the next day, now they can know for sure. This little water-proof appendage attaches on goggles for athletic and recreational swimmers to keep track of their heart rates and calories burnt during an exercise. Not only is this a unique invention on a global scale, the creator is a Lebanese swimmer and AUB engineering student, Hind Hobeika . This keeps track of an athlete’s performance by monitoring drills, conditioning and practices, potentially shaping up a future team of Olympians.
This fantastic app from Egypt with the motto of “We empower people to beat traffic together” needs to catch on throughout the region, ASAP.
Bey2ollak (translation: “I’ll tell you”), is a chat platform that allows you to exchange info about the best routes to take, traffic jams to avoid and the time it takes to get from one location to another, all from the help of other traffic-jammed people. On the app you select where you are, where you’re going and users help you get there. If the app works for the chaotic streets of Egypt, then it should do wonders for the less populated countries in the region.
Solarist
Healthy drinking water is still a huge problem for much of the MENA region . In true environment-loving style, a group of Egyptian engineers created this renewable energy solution called SolDesm, a portable, affordable solar-powered water desalination machine which uses solar power to purify sea water and underground water. This green-wise method saves on diesel oil expenditures and is of course better for the ecosystem. It’s mainly a service offered to coastal cities, cafes and restaurants by the sea and crisis cities whose sanitization infrastructures have been hit .
Which inventions did we miss? Nominate your favorite Middle Eastern companies in the comments below.