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Nurturing Enterprise (and Employment) in the Middle East
DEVELOPMENTS Following the recent Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship, the Obama administration’s focus has shifted to utilizing public-private partnerships to build sustainable economic infrastructure worldwide, including in the Middle East. President Obama’s Summit followed a series of initiatives in the region – the Forum on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Middle East and North Africa, held in Casablanca in 2006, and the international conference on small-medium enterprise (SME) development in Damascus, Syria in February 2010 – to support entrepreneurship, innovation, and small-medium enterprise (SME) development. In the Arab world, SME development is an essential strategy for addressing the most serious development challenge in the region: unemployment.