Jordanian woman entrepreneur bags UNCTAD award

AMMAN — Jordanian engineer Afnan Ali on Tuesday won the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) Empretec Women in Business Award.

“Code is a base language that will help us build our future. Afnan Kamel Ali, a Jordanian tech entrepreneur, recognised this fact early on in her electrical engineering career and more than a decade ago when she has the vision to start the Eureka Tech Academy,” according to the UNCTAD.

Ali founded the Eureka Tech Academy for children aged between six and 16 years old to become innovators and engineers, and then to commercialise their ideas, with a special focus on Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of things, and robotics, and so far has trained 5,000 Arab youth.

Ali’s work has won her the 7th UNCTAD Empretec Women in Business Award via an online ceremony held on December 10.

Empretec is an entrepreneurship capacity-building programme that uses a special behavioural approach to building and facilitating entrepreneurial skills, according to UNCTAD.

During the ceremony, Ali said that “starting a new project does not necessarily need a business plan but having an unshakable belief of the ‘why’ behind this project is a must.”

“I believed that a change had to start in our education system, which lacked technology training, and so that’s where I started with a dream to help children become inventors because that’s what I wanted to be when I was a child,” she added.

In statements to Petra News Agency, Ali said that Eureka is “the dream and ambition that has never left her”.