 I never thought I would move to Tunisia. I, even though I speak the language and I visited in the summers and I have family here, I always felt more of a New Yorker than anything else. Then January 14th, 2011, my tiny unknown country got catapulted into the spotlight and the whole world took notice, including me. The revolution made me feel disarmingly proud of the Tunisian people. My people. I couldn't stop asking my family for updates constantly on what was going on. Plus it didn't hurt that for the first time in my life I didn't have to explain to people in the States that I was not from Tanzania and I was not from Indonesia. At the time of the revolution, I was preparing to do research on my master's thesis at New York University. I was studying international business and economic development and with two classmates, we were examining the role of private sector development in peace building. We were looking at countries in the midst of conflict such as Somalia and those emerging from it, such as Rwanda, and we wanted to understand what role businesses had to play in increasing levels of peacefulness in a country. I had always been interested in this role of business and economic development and poverty alleviation and how it can improve people's livelihoods. More specifically, I was curious about how entrepreneurship can help societies transition from conflict to more sustained levels of peace. This belief in the potential of entrepreneurship took me from working with Ashoka in Washington, D.C. to Endeavour in New York City and all the way to Burundi working for the United Nations. So even though Tunisia hadn't just emerged from a war, as I was doing my studies, the similarities between the transitions became more and more unavoidable. I was intrigued. So in June of last year, I decided to pack up and come to Tunis and brush up on my Arabic and write a blog about entrepreneurship. I very naively started cold calling CEOs, investors, banks, entrepreneurs themselves, just to pick their brains, just to understand what is entrepreneurship in Tunisia, how does it look, what's happening, what is the culture, what is the innovation level. Not only did they generously give me their time, they gave me their knowledge. And I was hooked, I was drawn in. I was impressed by the already developed entrepreneurial ecosystem that already does exist here in Tunisia. So I did it. I left New York City, I packed my bags and I moved into my uncle's house in Krum. And with my newly minted Tunisian ID card, I voted on October 23rd in the first Democratic elections in Tunisia. In Tunisia. Some people thought I was crazy and other people thought I was brave and my family, well, they were just very proud. When I'm here, I genuinely see potential all around me, especially in Tunisia's youth. Unemployment here, as we all know, is very high among youth, as it is in the rest of the region. And it's a huge risk. It's an even higher risk if we don't integrate this population into the economy. The majority of these youth are overeducated with skills that do not match the job market. The international donor community and local civil society have all come to this conclusion that entrepreneurship is the engine of economic growth and job creation. And this is not necessarily misguided, except for the fact that entrepreneurship does not automatically equal job creation without a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem. And unless we start to build this ecosystem now, we risk misappropriating and squandering all of this valuable support and momentum that's existing around entrepreneurship in Tunisia right now. Daniel Eisenberg wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review in June 2010 called How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution. And I read this recently, and it really struck me as well, how appropriate, you know, we just went through, Tunisia just went through its own revolution. He's talking about a new kind of revolution, entrepreneurial revolution. In the article, he speaks about how in order for entrepreneurship to thrive, we have to take a holistic approach to entrepreneurship. We can't only talk about policy reform or regulation reform. We have to also talk about education reform, reform of the banking system, venture capital, private equity. We have to celebrate success stories. We have to promote an entrepreneurial culture, and most importantly, we have to work in partnership. As I was reading this, it struck me as so incredibly relevant to Tunisia right now. Because Tunisia has an incredibly robust entrepreneurial ecosystem, but something is not working, something is not clicking. We, it lacks organization, it lacks synergy, it lacks partnership, and more than anything, it lacks innovation. I feel like I'm constantly meeting investors here looking for interesting projects to invest in, and I'm constantly meeting entrepreneurs who are looking for investors. One entrepreneur, many entrepreneurs that I've met have told me that they're not even aware of the 26 public incubators that exist, or the 15 public financing instruments that exist. These are all meant to be promoting entrepreneurship, but there's a lack of communication, there's a lack of partnership. So what am I doing here? Why did I come back to Tunisia? I want to be part of an entrepreneurial revolution. I want to analyze, mobilize, and rationalize the way we do entrepreneurship in Tunisia. And I hope with all of your help, we can do just that.