Successful Yemeni Businesswomen

Successful Yemeni Businesswomen

Women Issues: Successful businesswomen paving new paths

Three Yemeni businesswomen are helping to inspire a new generation of women looking to push their boundaries and take a more active role in their society. These women are the heads of their companies, and work in various fields across public and private arenas.

 Najat Jumaan is an accomplished businesswoman whose education and career have made her name synonymous with business success in Yemen. She is Vice Dean at the Ministry of Finance, where she currently trains ministry staff. She is also a consultant for Jumaan Corp. and teaches MBA courses at Sana’a University. In addition, she works at her company Concept Investment Consultancy, which she established with her husband. “Through this firm we provide consultancy services in management, finance, and food industry engineering,” she says. In addition to these responsibilities, Jumaan is also the Director of the Yemeni Businesswomen Department at the Federation of Commerce and Industry.

Mai Noman is publisher and editor-in-chief of YoO Magazine, a publication aimed at reaching out to Yemeni youth and giving them a voice. She writes, edits, and plans the artwork, illustrations, and photos. “I mainly try to locate talent among our youth, whether it’s writing, designing, drawing or writing lyrics to songs,” she says. “I also work closely with our young and very talented designers and illustrators to prepare and approve page layouts that carry out the magazine’s visual or graphic style.”

Sarah Zabarah is the owner of Sazra Chocolatier in the Sana’a Trade Center. She currently makes all the chocolates herself, but business is growing and she is in the process of training a few chefs to assist her. All of her confections are crafted by hand using premium Belgian chocolate that is free of preservatives.

Jumaan cites her father, Mohammed, as the biggest influence in her career. Her father’s business life began in 1958 when he moved to Aden and became a budding entrepreneur. “My father was a village boy,” she says. “He moved to a city with opportunities and he took those opportunities.” However, the opportunities were not entirely free from difficulty. Before the country’s unification, South Yemen was under communist rule. “Free business just couldn’t find a place in the system,” she says. Eventually, he took his company north to Sana’a, where it was less inhibited by government restrictions. In Sana’a, the company grew. Mohammed became a pioneer in supplying the country with tractors, deep well pumps, and marine engines. “We really had a role in the development of the country,” she says. 

As his eldest daughter, Jumaan was very close to him and quickly became involved in his business life. “I watched him in all that he did,” she says. When it came time for Jumaan to enter school, she was a good student. “I wanted to study hard so I could be useful to my society.”

Her studies paid off, and when it was time for college she was offered a scholarship to Romania. But the closeness to her father that had brought this success made it hard to be away. “It was too difficult to leave my family,” she says. 

In the end, she decided to go to the School of Commerce and Economics at Sana’a University. She continued to be a diligent student, but at this point she didn’t really consider herself as a possessor of any true business potential. After she graduated with honors and received her Bachelor’s in Business Administration, her professors expressed their desire to have her stay at the school and teach. They encouraged her to apply as a teaching assistant in her department. “From that point, I thought seriously about work in business, especially business in the academic arena,” she says.

She took their advice and taught at the School of Commerce and Economics at Sana’a University, taking a break to pursue her Master’s Degree. This time, she chose to leave the country to chase her success and hone her skills. She studied at Aziza Pacific in California. In 1990, she earned her Master’s in International Business and Strategic Management. Then she left the United States and returned to Yemen to once again take up her teaching position.

A year later, she became the deputy chairman at her father’s company. She worked in various roles and used her flexibility and expertise to help the company grow. “I worked in any place I could participate,” she says. “Accounting, management, human resources, organizational development.” Her father was grateful for her involvement and encouraged her work in the company. “He didn’t reject any of my participation.” He relied on her talents for developing systems based on computer automation to increase efficiency in the company. By 1993, the company had grown significantly. It still had a hand in basic development, but in addition to tractors, pumps, and engines, the company now dealt with development on a grander scale, in fields such as road construction. It also opened a massive poultry feed mill in Taiz with a capacity of ten thousand tons of feed per hour. Plans to diversify further began to take shape, with talk of a Jumaan hypermarket retail store.

But Jumaan wasn’t finished yet. She left Yemen to pursue more education and training, this time in Egypt. She received a PhD in Business Administration and Finance at Canal Suez University in 1999. Following her schooling in Egypt, she once again returned to Yemen to take up the mantle of a university professor in Sana’a. Jumaan instructed students in various business administration courses dealing with financial markets, financial institution and management, and finance and management. She also assumed new responsibilities as she became the executive manager at Jumaan Corp.

In 2005, Jumaan had to leave her post for a new opportunity: she was nominated as Vice Dean at the Ministry of Finance. Despite this new responsibility, she is still a consultant for her father’s company. 

Zabarah also names her father as a source of inspiration. “Most of all, what gave me the real push to start the store was definitely my family’s support,” she says.”Like my father always says, ‘You have to take risks, otherwise you will miss every opportunity that comes knocking on your door.’”

For Zabarah, the initial opportunity arose because of a friend’s wedding. “I had to make over 1000 pieces of chocolate,” she says. “This was how I started Sazra Chocolates.” At first, the new opportunity was a massive challenge. “I had studied at three chocolate academies in Canada, the States, and Belgium,” she says. “But the process here was hard because of the difference in atmosphere and the elevation.” But Zabarah didn’t back down. “The constant change of temperature was a big obstacle since temperature can either make it or break it. But, after all night experiments and burnt chocolate, I came up with ways to work around our unique weather.”

Like Jumaan and Zabarah, Noman also was extensively educated in her field before beginning her business life. “I was born in Taiz, and grew up in Egypt where I received my bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and worked as a freelance writer for an English magazine,” she says. “In 2007 I received a scholarship to attend a fellowship program in the US for six months where I received an Executive MBA from Wharton School of Business that was followed by an internship at Holmes Murphy and Associates in Dallas. In December 2007 I decided to move back to my home country, Yemen.” 

Her project, YoO Magazine, is a new one. “I came up with the idea of YoO in late May of this year and amazingly we were able to publish the first issue in August,” she says. 

Like starting any new business, the process of launching the magazine was long and tiring, but undeniably rewarding. She is thankful for the help she received along the way. “I received a lot of help and advice from well established publishers and editors of newspapers and magazines in Yemen as well as support in general,” she says. “The Minister of Information, Mr. Hassan al-Lawzi, and the general director of the journalism department, Mr. Ibrahim Abdul-habib, were very helpful and supportive of this youth project.” Once the magazine took shape, her next step was to line up distribution, where to print, and where to find potential contributors. Noman also came up with the idea to use social networking on the internet to reach her audience. “One of our main channels of connecting with our target readers was through Facebook, which as I have seen has proven to be the best medium to connect with the Yemeni youth,” she says.

Noman says she is cautiously optimistic about the role of women in business today. Jumaan is as well. In her opinion, the businesswomen sector has the potential to greatly contribute to Yemen’s future. She believes poverty and unemployment can be reduced by enabling disenfranchised women to succeed. “I invite women to venture into this sector,” she says. 

Zabarah agrees. “Like many girls in Yemen, before I started this business I thought that there was no way a woman can make it in this society, but surprisingly I found many people that praised and loved the idea of more women starting their own business and being a part of this society.”

For those wanting to follow in these women’s footsteps and enter the business sector or to increase their success in the field, Jumaan has some advice. In her opinion, the most important thing is taking the first step. “The opportunity is there,” she says. “You just have to look for where to start.” ■