Baghdad's "Irrational Optimists"

Tell us about Fikra Space.

We’re a hackerspace in Iraq, so we basically support tech enthusiasts and science enthusiasts to work together and realise their ideas. We do workshops on technical things, such as coding and programming, and we also do workshops on the business side of things, such as how to start your business, how to market it to customers.

We mentor young people who want to do start ups and create opportunities for themselves. And we also offer them a place to come and work on their start ups. We are trying to encourage and accelerate entrepreneurship in Iraq, by focusing on technology.

We started in 2012 as a global maker space initiative to inspire people in the Middle East and I think people were just amazed that there was so much demand and interest in technology in Iraq.

When you started, there was this brilliant phrase used by your founder, Bilal Ghalib, “irrational optimism.” A few years later--and looking to the future, Iraq still has so many challenges. The question is, are we still on“irrational optimism?”

Mobile internet penetration is phenomenal and rising so quickly in Iraq. We have seen in Kenya, how apps have been developed to help farmers and used for education in India. Where do you see the next five years--can we move on to rational optimism in Iraq yet?

I think we need to split the political situation away from actual development that happens within society. When I think about the political situation, there’s a lot of challenges and it is difficult to see the light.

When I think about society, we can be optimists, because I feel that there are a lot more opportunities now than three years ago, but I think we have come to the point where people think, “you can’t rely on the government to provide everything for you. I need to create my own opportunities.”

An entrepreneurship culture is rising and people are becoming more independent and outward looking, the internet has brought many new concepts to Iraq. And for the next 5 years I think we’ll see a huge wave of young people who want to create opportunities, because society is not handing them opportunities on a plate.

Iraq is a great country for technology because we have 35 million people and 50% of them are below 35 years of age so you have a huge population of early adopters, people that learn quickly, and people that want new things, if only for entertainment.

So technology presents opportunity, it doesn’t require brick and mortar infrastructure which requires a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of time and effort to get through. But technology is simple because anyone can create it, hold it in their hand. It is something that can start small and grow, not something that starts big and takes a lot of sustaining.

We’ve seen mobile penetration in Iraq go from zero to 100% since 2003. Similarly smart phone penetration was 30% before the launch of 3G in January this year. So people want new things, even if they can’t utilise them fully. The large youth population really make new technology take off.

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