 Greetings and welcome to this live event sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. Today's program is about leadership in the power of cultural exchanges and launching entrepreneurial ideas. We'd like to highlight a project called SheCAP, started by four Jordanian women who participated in a State Department-sponsored exchange program last year. SheCAP is a female-run taxi service in Jordan aimed at providing safe and reliable transportation for women while creating new job opportunities. The SheCAP founders met each other during their exchange program in the United States and were inspired by a local woman-owned taxi cab service that they used during their five-week exchange program, which is called the Study of the U.S. Institute for Student Leaders on Women's Leadership, also known as SUSE. I'm BJ McDuffie, a program exchange affairs and recruitment specialist at the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. Before I introduce our guests, we'd like to remind you to use the hashtag ExchangeAlumni and hashtag SUSE to tweet about this live event and send us pictures. Also, don't forget to type your questions in the chat space at the bottom of your video player. I'm excited to be joined today by the four founders of the SheCAP team who are connecting live from Amman, Jordan, Rameh Abu-Shuaimeh, Maha Alamad, Aslam Abu-Khadra, and Surah Al-Mahsis. Welcome to the show. I'm also happy to welcome Ella and her Jones, who is joining us from St. Mary's College in South Bend, Indiana, where she's completing her final year as an undergraduate student. She met Rameh, Maha, Salam, and Surah last year at St. Mary's College. Ella Noor and the SheCAP team are here today to share their experience of launching a business that started as a result of their participating in a SUSE exchange program. They're here to answer your questions. I'd also like to extend a special welcome to our viewing groups in Amman, Rabat, Algiers, Abiyan, Triana, Liberia, including all of you who gathered at our American Corners to watch this program, especially Hira Batul-Rizvi, who also founded a SheCAP in Pakistan, the country's first safe taxi service for working women. Her business connects registered riders, working women, to reliable cab drivers from a database of trusted drivers to provide shared monthly transportation services. While completing her Master's in Science from Georgia Tech on the Fulbright Scholarship, Hira and her team participated in a global hackathon with the idea of a safe taxi-hailing service. They won, and Hira decided to take the idea to Pakistan. She started working with the Venture Lab at Georgia Tech soon after. Her services have been operational in the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi since August 2015. We're delighted that she could join us today. Now, while we wait for your questions to come in, let's hear briefly from the SheCAP team in Eleanor. Amman, welcome to the program. Hi, everyone. My name is Chinab Sweeney. I'm the Chief Leader of the SheCAP team. Previously, SheCAP has a safe transportation service for working women and passengers, and it's also a solution that we figured to decrease the number of unemployment among women in Jordan, especially those who have no educational background. So SheCAP is here to provide a new career path for coordinating women as drivers and to advocate women's role in leadership and in all of the sectors. We are presenting women now as cab drivers. Someday, we will present them as the third female Prime Minister in the Jordan. Thank you. Great. And we're truly excited to give the support community, you know, to lead the change in our community in Jordan. Thank you. Great. So, is Eleanor Jones there? Yes, I'm here. Hi. Would you introduce yourself? Hi. My name is Eleanor Jones. I'm a senior at St. Mary's College, and I had the honor of meeting the SheCAP team when they were here studying for five weeks through the SUSE program, and I got to watch the SheCAP ideas start from the very beginning and show our support after they left. Great. So, Rame, we're coming back to you. Can you tell us a little more about SheCAP and how your participation in the SUSE program on women's leadership helped you and your business partners to launch SheCAP? When we were in the SUSE program, we were participating in the SUSE program before investment there. And the last week of the program was about a friendly competition among participants from different countries to develop and to come up with a gender-based project for our community. We came up with SheCAP when we were inspired by a female tax collector in the state named Dale Hickey. She inspired us to design business to provide the service here in Jordan for women. Great. Thank you. Eleanor, this next question is for you. How did you get involved in SheCAP and what was your motivation for doing so? So, I got more involved near the end. So, as the program continued, we had a kind of an in-house competition where the different delegations, we evaluated their projects and SheCAP won. And in result, the administrative staff at St. Mary's got to go to Jordan to evaluate their business plan. And I told them that I wanted to go and we got to go to Jordan and visit the team and see how they were doing. And when we returned, me and Emily Bedouin, another student, decided we wanted to fundraise to show our support of what they're doing in Amman. That's great. Okay. Let's turn to our audience in Jordan for the first live question. Amman, do you have a question? Any questions? No, no, no, no. We have no questions left. Okay. Well, I have a question. So, this is for Hamid. So, I understand that you're studying pharmacy at university. What inspired you to become an entrepreneur and launch SheCAP? Actually, three of our team members are pharmacists. Oh, great. We have the three of us are pharmacists. Or pharmacists, you know, actually. What inspired us is the need. This is what inspired us. We want you to address the need that is, that the ordaining woman takes to Jordan. When we were there, we just wanted to present the idea as an idea for other CAP offices here in Jordan just to let them launch the idea and set. But because we found a lot of social significance and a lot of obstacles and a lot of projection, you know, this is what inspired us to be the entrepreneurs ourselves and to start preserving our health. Wonderful. So, another question. Why is it important for entrepreneurs in the United States and aspiring entrepreneurs from around the world to collaborate on projects like SheCAP to work together? Because, you know, we have seen so many successful stories in the United States that and not much of them here in Jordan. Especially when it comes to women entrepreneurs, because in the States we have met so many successful women in so many other sectors like politics, economy, entrepreneurship and whatnot. But here in Jordan, we still have a number of successful stories in terms of entrepreneurship. This is why I believe it is very important for this cooperation to take place, you know, to learn from the experiences and the successful stories that are going to happen in the States. Okay. So, I understand that you've recently applied for and won a grant from the State Department for your project. Over 800 projects applied and only 50 received funding. So, what steps did you need to take to make this happen? In other words, how did you take SheCAP from an idea to an actual business plan? And how did you think of an approach, branding and market strategy? You know, as I told you previously, when we came back from the States, we just wanted, you know, to implement the idea as an idea and so that others have services agencies would implement it in reality. But because we have faced so many rejections, it was risk-bearing for us to start doing it ourselves. And of course, we needed the money and, you know, we needed funding to start our journey because as you see, we are old students and we have no money basically. So, actually, the fundraising business... First of all, we have a number of workshops to be in and to see like business development and presentation workshops and fundraising. Then we have held the proposal for the US Department of State AEIF and we have been selected to participate in the final phase of the competition. And we have won about $21,000. Wonderful. So, what feedback did you receive from your community so far about your project? Well, we have both the positive and the negative feedback. Of course, we cannot deny the fact that Jordan is a very, very reserved country, but we're trying and we're striving to do this project to advocate, you know, women's role and what women can do and what's not. We want to emphasize that, you know, working and supporting yourself financially as a woman is not a cheap woman. We're going outside to, you know, find a job or seek financial aid for herself and for her family. So, a lot of people were supporters because people know that programming women needs this kind of service. Some of them opposed the idea and, you know, they rejected their voice because of the, you know, ideology that comes back to thousands years, actually. But, you know, we're up to that and we understand that, you know, not everyone will accept this idea and we're going to keep going because this is how we're going to change the ideology. Wonderful. So, I've got another question, but first I need to ask you to please move a little closer to the microphone. Thank you. So, this question comes from Rabat. So, they would like to know, how does she-cap team fundraise for their projects? So, we just recently heard about you winning the grant from the State Department, AIEF. Have you been able to fundraise in any other ways? Yeah, as Eleanor said, she and Emily Bedwin have raised a fund for us to senior college in Northern Virginia University. They have raised about $2,500. And, you know, right now, we're dealing with this NGO here in Jordan, the local NGO folks who work and they're going to support us for about $8,000. Great. Congratulations. Another question from Rabat. What challenges did you face with the government to register your business? Or did you have any challenges? No, so now we have not faced any challenges because what's great about these regulations is that they apply on men just like on women. So, there are no specific regulations in terms of women starting this kind of business. We're going to through the whole process. Any man who starts such a business will go through. Okay. So, the challenges... Sorry, what? I'm just saying that the challenges are the same and as long as the men are, you know, are handling this kind of challenges, we can do. So, that actually kind of answers the question that we have from Avignon, which is what challenges did you face when you launched your business? Do you have anything generally, any other general challenges besides, you know, how you registered the business with the government? Anything with your team or convincing your families to get on board? You know, not with the government, but of course, we're facing so many social significance very hard. People are saying that, you know, when women start driving, as women did not drive before, but they're specifically saying that as soon as women start driving, you know, accidents won't increase, you know, traffic will be more challenging and, you know, a lot of maybe rate incidents or harassment would, you know, increase because the passengers or the male passengers would start harassing the female driver. But this is where we came up with the idea of developing our own phone app where we guarantee the safety of the women as passengers and as drivers. Wonderful. Okay, a question for Eleanor. Do you have any fundraising tips? Well, I think what was successful at St. Mary's is that we made the connection between the women in Jordan with the women on St. Mary's campus. So being an all women's college, we take women's safety very seriously. And I think safe transportation is something that we take for granted because we have it. So being able to connect our safe transportation to promote safe transportation elsewhere gets the student body involved and makes it more of a personal issue. So I think being able to connect it to the people you're trying to raise money from really helped raise money for She-Cam. Great, great idea, great tip. Sonana wants to know, what steps did you have to take during project implementation? I think that can go to anyone who wants it. Rami? The process of implementation. So what was your, what was the process? How did you get the build from idea to actually making the She-Cam happen? Of course, we've never made it this far. So it was not for the mentorship of the St. Mary's College staff, Martha Smith, Professor, Annalisa, and of course the two great students and supporters, Eleanor Jones and Emily Goodwin. You know, they have helped us developing our business plan and our financial statements. And this is how we started. We have developed our timeline and a specific process to go through and to implement. So this is how the implementation process works. Great. Okay, question from Lusaka. How important is cooperation to your team? Very important, you know, the four of us did not work together if we did not support each other because there was times when people, you know, just, you know, made us feel bad about our own project. You know, they, they, they made it look bad. And if we, the four of us did not, you know, settle for each other and support each other. I don't think that we just, we just made it this far. Great. So thank you for your great questions. Now let's check in with our live audience in Amman, Jordan. Do you have any other questions for us? Thought of any over there? They don't. Okay. Well, we could take more questions from our viewers. Let's see. Challenges. So what beyond women's safety is the goal of your project? Would you like to expand SHICAB to other countries beyond Jordan or other communities? Do you have like an end goal or an ideal dream of how big you want SHICAB to be? I believe the end goal is that the plan is going to be seen as a big deal in one. Well, there is, like, other countries that already thought that the whole idea of SHICAB their own version of SHICAB. But, you know, for me, I think the end goal is... Okay. Sorry. Excuse me. Can you get a little closer to the microphone? Sorry. I want to hear your answer. Perfect. So I think there's a lot of fun things at the moment that they already have their own version of SHICAB. And I think the end goal is that there's a plan that you see with shoppers, that there's a woman who is driving the gas and, you know, a casual thing to do. And it's also something that will, you know, to decide if it's kind of not going to start from online, so it's going to go all over the... go all over the city of Jordan. So that will be creating more job opportunities. And so, yeah, for me, I think it's to be seen something that is as casual as possible. Great. We'll be looking, waiting to see how that changes. Another question from Lusaka. Have you ever been discriminated against because you're female business owners? So, by other business owners? Yes. And, you know, some people are also afraid that, you know, architecture is segregating men from women. And we're saying that we're not segregating. We're just providing another choice because, you know, part of the challenge as we believe is providing more choices for women, you know, just like any other profession, males and females working these professions and people, you know, have the freedom to choose to whoever to go. For example, some people prefer going to a female doctor instead of a male doctor. So we want to provide, you know, this choice for other people so that they would feel, you know, more empowered and they have the freedom to choose to whether they are comfortable being with more, you know. And some people also have said that, you know, as women and, of course, as young women, especially that we cannot succeed because we are affecting the experience and knowledge in business. And that we agree with. We have no experience in this field before, but, you know, it's a learning process and we're learning from the best. Okay. So I have a question now for Eleanor. Hi, Eleanor. Why is it important for women in the United States and women from around the world to collaborate on projects like CCAP in your opinion? I think it's important for these programs to connect because I think it's important to create a unity between women of different cultures to share in our similarities and then share in our differences and be able to support each other. I think that particularly here at St. Mary's some students may not realize that the concerns that they share, the concerns they have are shared with other women in different parts of the world. And I think it just creates cultural ties that are really important for a progressing world. Great. If there's one follow-up to that as well, how has this exchange program impacted you, Eleanor, and your life? Oh, it's amazing. These four women inspire me every day. And I say that even if they don't become as successful as they hoped to, they've still succeeded because they've helped women and it's inspired me to go beyond what I think my limits are. Coming through the Susie program, I don't think any of us expected she kept to flourish as it did and it's been wonderful and it's just shown me that anybody can make an impact and do something worthwhile. Great. Okay, so this is for both Eleanor and the ladies and Aman. What surprised you most about working on this project? Is there anything that you didn't expect or came out of it? It's a good thing that whoever we looked at their door, they helped us and they were just like supporting us and I like to say that they are not they interested in the whole shoot-up project and they were always connecting us with other people. And at first I thought that they would like to support us and think this project has they would like to see us do. So I'm very glad about this. Good. What has been the role of technology in helping you develop and advance your business? The technology has played a critical role actually in developing our business because people were questioning how safe would it be for women to be with another woman which is a question to find that women are not safe here in Gordon. But we are developing a phone app, as I said, that is aiming to provide to guarantee for women as drivers and as passengers. There will be mass-tracking made of the very time and so many other features that would make women as a passenger and a driver so comfortable. So I believe that we will never make our brand comments if it was not for this app. So technology is playing a very critical role in developing our business. Very cool. Did you find a balance between your project and your studies or have you decided to become full-time entrepreneurs? The history to start to balance between studying and the information because I think we need to spend some time to make a project to our project. So yeah, we're managing that. Great. What is, and this is for everyone, what is one piece of advice you would have for other young entrepreneurs like yourselves? I would say keep fighting all the social figures, stereotype, style, anything that suits you because once you start believing in something, you need to take it to the finishing line because some people's lives can't depend on it because when we provide new jobs for agencies for women, we're giving them hopes to break their cycle and start depending on themselves. So these are tangible messages I believe. So to all the entrepreneurs all around the world, you need to believe in your message and take it to the finishing line no matter how many obstacles you make to it. It's very inspiring. Anyone else have any advice? I would like to say that this is an advice for everyone that just do whatever you like whether they're in the industry and whether they're in the company. I would also say that if I'm in the trade-off and you have to do differently with this decision, there's no option. True. Can I apply for Susie? Yeah. Sorry, can you repeat that? Apply for Susie. Apply for Susie, yes. We definitely encourage that. We have a question from Rabat. Have you gotten any anecdotes about women benefiting from your project yet? From your customers. So have you had any success stories from women who have used She-Cab? Our project is under reconstruction. Maybe I would have been successful yet. Fair enough. So that will be seen. We can't wait to hear about that. A question from Algeria. How did you come up with the idea and what is the social issue exactly you were tackling? I think you've kind of addressed this a bit. But I think we could reiterate that you learned, you saw this in action as something, you saw a female cab driver when you were in the United States and you were inspired and the short version is you've brought it back to Jordan and you're starting and launching it from there. Do you have anything to add as well about how that started that we haven't discussed yet? No. So what do you consider to be your strengths and weaknesses together as a team or on the project? Is there anything that you've had to learn or had to work on? Anything that came particularly easy to you when becoming entrepreneurs? What? Well, I would say that we are providing state staff positions for females and we are also in the meantime providing recognition for women's careers. I think it's the passion we all have we all share and I think the thing that makes us all similar or that makes us all focus on our project is that we all work together and with me that we have we share many interests and we share as well understanding and trying to highlight what each one of us stands for as a player we can tell ourselves as a whole to some other things we do. Yeah, it looks like you have a very strong team with the four of you together. I think that's important. So this question is for Rame. When you launched Shecap what was the criticism that you received and how did it help you to improve Shecap? Like as you're working what are the naysayers saying and how are you getting beyond that? We have received so many criticism. People, you know, women cannot drive that incidents would increase a traffic would increase and people will just suffer from this phenomenon that women will be driving Shecap in the streets. How does that help move on to our events? It made us more persistent and more determined. We want to break this very time because as women we have seen women driving before, we drove before and we know that we did not accident and traffic and what not. So as long as people have this very time and I believe it wouldn't embarrass us to hear the great stories that happened. Great. So we have a question from an online viewer and they would like to know who can become an entrepreneur? I would say anyone with fashion and a good strategy and great censorship similar to the one we got from the famous Talbot. Great idea. Excuse me what? Can you repeat that please? Great idea. I would like to know if you have a question about having something new if sometimes you have seen something in a different perspective and you know Shecap itself is not absolutely nothing new about Shecap you did not invent the concept of female driving cap obviously and it has been there from a lot of years so I would like to bring something new to other countries That's very true and that actually kind of goes into our next question from Algiers. You said you know Shecap is a great idea and you need that idea to kind of germinate and their question is did you have any alternative ideas for what to do if your project didn't work or what was your plan B? So as for our plan B our plan A was about having the owner of the vehicle and the car as a plan B kind of a store stand where we can try to make it easier where the start point goes from all over an application so we don't have to handle a lot of posts we don't have to do a lot of you know as much of time since finding investors of the project on having the application that will connect our drivers that we will force train as well as our customer base that we will go through our feedback service and that will be done specifically by the application that's our plan B in case you could not find enough funding to last our Shecap service with the owner of the car and our own stand Interesting Okay So this question comes from Monrovia What are some of the advantages and disadvantages for one to become an entrepreneur? The advantages are mainly the some learning classes we learn a lot from doing an internship more you come to the needs of the needs of people here in Jordan in your country or in the US of the people to learn how to address them in more than a way you know there are so many ways to address the needs of people to make up solutions for problems that people already have it makes you think about all of these all of these segments and all of these avenues it makes you more aware of the economic problems that you have in your community and so I thought the advantages on the other hand are you're going to face so many circumstances a lot of obstacles and it's my fault some people back so it's very important for the entrepreneurs to have a very strong personality and a really good intuition that he or she is doing so these are the the advantages that people rely on to try to go do that and you know people will not always be there to support you when you are just meeting some people might make it harder for you to succeed and these are the disadvantages but you know for everyone who has the the needs to overcome all of these challenges okay so another question from online this is Amal Kayap how do you plan to convince or encourage the use of she-cab in the Arab world what about Saudi Arabia how do you plan to expand and get people to sign up in Saudi Arabia are you actually interested in Saudi Arabia excuse me are you interested in Saudi Arabia yes do you think you should expand you could expand there and have women driving someday someday yeah of course now women are voting someday they are going to start they must make this new mode that allow women to drive in specific hours and you know this is the start and we believe that the end to it and we believe that the start and you know you might want to have an impact yeah we hope you think you will have an impact we'll see question for Eleanor I'm here hi was your trip to Jordan with the St. Mary's Team your first time overseas or have you been to Jordan before it was my first time in the Middle East but not my first time overseas so it was a very exciting experience to see the women because I got to learn a lot about Jordan before going, so coming to actually see the places that these women talked about was really exciting. Awesome. So the last question we have is, how do we apply for a State Department exchange program? And that is a question that I can answer, and I think you can also jump in if you have a personal experience. But I do a lot of work promoting the Fulbright program and the Susie program, and we have a website at the State Department called exchanges.state.gov. And you can go to that website and there's drop-down menus, so you can say you're a U.S. citizen, you are a non-U.S. citizen, and then you can choose, you're a student, you're a young professional, you're a high school student even, and within that website, it'll give you a lot of different options for programs that are available for your country of citizenship, your age group, and your education level. So programs like Susie, you can apply to participate in while you're still getting your bachelor's, or if you're a scholar, and things like Fulbright, you can apply to come to the United States for your master's degree or a PhD, or later to teach your native language, or later to come do research or teach as a scholar. There are a whole lot of different programs available, especially on the youth side as well, for high school students who would like a first experience abroad. So these ladies here participated in the Susie program, and they got to come spend a summer at St. Mary's College in Indiana, and they got to learn a lot about American culture and U.S. culture, and now they're bringing that back to Jordan, and they're also, we're able to share a lot of their culture with their students, as Eleanor can serve as an example about, it was a true cultural exchange, and we're so proud of you all for that, and excited to see what you'll do next. So Rame, before we close, I'd like to hear your final thoughts and anything you'd like to leave with our viewers today, especially those out there who may be interested in applying for the Susie program or another State Department's sponsored exchange program like Fulbright, and so just try to speak slowly and clearly, and we'd love to hear it. I advise everyone to apply for the program, because unfortunately it changed my mind, it changed my mind, my mindset, the way I look at things, and I have an experience in all of you. It made me realize what I want to be because I will be free every one of you, I live by five acres, so for the first time, I would say that I know now what I want to be exactly, so I encourage everyone to apply for these, for these, for these, for these, they are life changing experiences. That's something we hear a lot that our exchange programs are life changing, and they really are. You can't ever be the exact same person you were before you left. So I'd like to thank you all very much for your insightful questions and your answers, thanks team. That wraps up our live event today. To Eleanor, Rame, and the She-Cab team, I'd like to thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your story of becoming entrepreneurs and how your idea grew out of your exchange program. And finally, I'd like to thank our live audience in Amman, as well as all of you who joined this program live from around the world. My sincere thanks to the viewing groups who joined us from all over, and a recording of this program will be available later on the website. So remember, you can go to exchanges.state.gov to find out more about the many exchange programs offered by the US Department of State, including SUSE, and you can also check out the Study of the US Institute's Facebook page, or the nearest US Embassy website for program announcements on how to apply for programs like SUSE in the 2016 cycle. And that announcement will happen later this fall. You can follow SUSE on Twitter, using at Study of the US or hashtag SUSE, and stay tuned for our next interactive program. Thanks again, and see you all next time. Goodbye. Thank you.