The Goethe Institute has launched the first Arabic educational platform for young entrepreneurs and innovators in the field of arts and crafts, with the aim of boosting the entrepreneurship ecosystem, creative and cultural industries in Egypt and the wider Middle East.

The new platform, ebtedy.com, has the slogan “It’s time to move outside the box.”

Ebtedy provides content and resources for young entrepreneurs in simple language, aiming to help them turn their ideas into creative and commercial products and services.

“According to UNESCO, cultural and creative industries are among the fastest growing businesses in the world and have proven to be a sustainable development option that relies on a unique and renewable resource, which is human creativity,” says Selma Halilovic, a coordinator at the Goethe Institute Cultural and Creative Economics programme.

There is no specific definition of creative projects. They are the product of combining human creativity with knowledge and technology to produce several fields, ranging from culture management and jewellery and ceramics to architectural design, artistic and theatrical production, electronic publishing, software development and electronic games.

“Focusing on the scene in Egypt and the Arab world,” Halilovic adds, “we found an absence of platforms for knowledge transfer in the field of creative and handicraft industries management and culture management, which we have been keen to support through several projects.”

Heba El-Cheikh, one of the content developers, explains that the platform combines all needed technical tools and expertise for entrepreneurs such as the stages of project creation, planning, financial management and marketing of the cultural and creative products, and finally project evaluation. The site also includes a number of successful stories from Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.

“We hope that young people in Egypt and the Arab world will benefit from it to transform their ideas and dreams into creative and marketable products and services that contribute to providing job opportunities and marketing the cultural product locally and internationally,” El-Cheikh adds.

The website was implemented with the support of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the German Agency for International Cooperation.

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