Noor, Communication Lead at Makers of Baghdad, channels her passion for supporting entrepreneurs by helping them grow with creative design and AI-powered tools.
Mubarak is a 28-year-old digital marketer in Sudan. He worked hard to build a promising career. But he saw his future disappear when the civil war broke out in 2023. He fled to the United Arab Emirates for safety and opportunity and struggled to find a job without a network or local experience. Then, a friend introduced him to Jobs for Humanity. Through its AI-powered platform and Inclusion Mentorship Program, he received a job offer at Damana, a UAE-based insurance company, and reclaimed the future he thought he lost.
Layla is a 26-year-old single mother in Egypt. She juggled multiple low-paying jobs to earn her college degree. After graduating, she realized she lacked the practical skills to enter the workforce after graduating. Layla sought out a skills training course to improve her candidacy. She signed up for one at Career 180, where she gained the experience to ultimately join their team as a facilitator and build a meaningful livelihood to support her family.
Noor is a 27-year-old Architecture graduate in Iraq. She discovered her passion for graphic design and entrepreneurship during her studies, but felt unfulfilled in various corporate roles. She was interested in combining her passion with supporting entrepreneurs, and applied for a graphic design internship at Makers of Baghdad. There, she gained hands-on experience with AI-powered design and marketing tools and was quickly promoted to Communication Lead, where she feels fulfilled helping scale small businesses every day.
Mubarak, Layla, and Noor’s stories illustrate the lifelines that MENA-based BSOs represent for workers in the region. While AI is expected to contribute USD 15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, education gaps and gender disparities have disproportionately slowed adoption rates across MENA, where unemployment rates stand at 25% for youth and 45% for women. BSOs are closing the gap by supporting students, job seekers, and entrepreneurs with the necessary skills, training, and connections to thrive in an AI-driven economy.
Their impact is rooted in their unique approach to AI: co-creation. Rather than treating AI as a tool, three BSOs in particular, Jobs for Humanity, Career 180, and Makers of Baghdad, actively and intentionally collaborate with it, pairing its speed and scale with human empathy and expertise to reach more people and build inclusive digital economies.
Jobs for Humanity: Reordering the AI and Human Roles for Equitable Hiring Practices
Jobs for Humanity co-creates with AI to match underrepresented talent with high-growth roles by reducing hiring bias and revealing untapped potential.
Jobs for Humanity uses AI to match job seekers with high-growth roles by reducing hiring biases and uncovering hidden potential in underrepresented candidates, including candidates who are refugees, neurodivergent, disabled, or formerly incarcerated. In the first phase of recruiting, their AI platform scans hundreds of applications in minutes, identifying qualified candidates who might otherwise be excluded due to gaps in work history, skills gained through informal work, failed startups, or volunteer experience. Humans then re-enter the process for interviews and mentorship. As founder Roy explains, “AI does not eliminate the human role, but reorders it.”
Mubarak is one of many successful job matches. In just four years since launch, Jobs for Humanity has placed over 3,500 candidates into jobs, collectively earning nearly USD 200M in wages. They have provided job coaching to more than 10,000 people and, through corporate partners such as IBM and Telus Digital, delivered training to 3,000 and placed over 260 people into roles, respectively. In the months ahead, Jobs for Humanity aims to continue co-creating with AI to make hiring as easy as hiring an Uber, further accelerating inclusive hiring at scale.
Through Jobs for Humanity’s AI-powered job matching platform and Inclusion Mentorship program, 28-year-old Mubarak re-built his career—and life.
Career 180: Curating Youth Career Growth Pathways to Meet Local Market Demands
At the Egypt Career Summit, Career180 leverages AI and human mentoring to equip thousands of youth and women with the skills and opportunities to succeed in the job market.
Career 180 is an edtech and employment platform that offers comprehensive services, from skill qualification to job placement, to better prepare underrepresented youth and female candidates for the job market. Based in Egypt, the team of 74 operates a series of online and offline programs as well as major career events, such as the Egypt Career Summit, across six countries in the MENA and Europe regions.
Career 180’s approach with AI includes a unique combination of AI-powered resume-building tools, interview preparation, and human mentoring. Career180, their career development platform, specializes in assessing learners’ skills, career goals, and market demands in real time to recommend and guide them with personalized courses, mentorship, and job opportunities. For Layla, this was the platform that helped her apply her newly acquired skills to transition quickly from student to facilitator. The organization currently offers over 250 courses, primarily in the business, tech, and creative industries.
Career 180’s AI technologies also extend to its partners. For example, through a partnership with Coca-Cola HBC, Career 180 provided a SaaS LMS platform similar to Career180, including curating courses and curriculum, supporting outreach efforts, and qualifying 20,000 youth into job vacancies.
One of the main challenges Career 180 faces with AI is the delicate balance between relying on it for efficiency and ensuring human oversight to guide, correct, and ethically apply its outputs for the best possible results. Yasmeen Samy, Head of Projects and Expansion, shares, “For example, AI can draft a résumé in seconds, but it’s our job to tailor it to the role, add local context, and make it truly stand out.”
As Career 180 continues to build and refine its collaborative partnership with AI, it's already leaving an impressive impact. Since 2017, Career 180 has served over 300,000 users and partnered with more than 2,000 organizations across Egypt and beyond. They’ve trained over 500,000 learners, delivered 250 courses, and facilitated over 10,000 coaching sessions. Their hiring events, such as the Egypt Career Summit and the upcoming Saudi Career Summit, each attract around 10,000 unique job seekers.
Makers of Baghdad: Strengthening the Country’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem through Collaborative Community Engagement
Entrepreneurs learning new AI-powered skills in Makers of Baghdad coworking space, where over 150 people visit daily.
Technology Space, known locally as Makers of Baghdad, is Iraq’s first data-driven hub. Since 2017, it has been on a mission to strengthen the country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem by equipping graduates with in-demand skills, scaling startups and SMEs with tools and market insights, and mapping emerging industries like fintech, solar, agribusiness, and food to identify critical market data gaps.
The Makers of Baghdad team, now comprising 11 full-time staff members, leverages AI to enhance their workflows, freeing up time for deeper community engagement and program design. Their Co-founder, Sarah, shares, “AI supports our multitasking, whether it’s managing programs, addressing startup needs, or bridging graduates with the private sector, so we can focus on impact.” AI engagement also extends to the entrepreneurs they serve. Referring to their engagement with AI, Noor shares, “AI isn’t just a trend. It’s helping them be more productive, manage their businesses better, and succeed.”
Makers of Baghdad weaves collaboration into everything it does, starting with the team members it hires, such as Noor, who prioritize community building. The Makers Space welcomes around 150 visitors each day, offering a coworking environment that fosters mutual learning while collaborating with other Baghdad-based hubs to connect founders with the right partners. With AI, Makers of Baghdad partners to teach it to understand the Iraqi language, culture, and market realities, ensuring that every training, campaign, and strategy is locally resonant.
To date, by pairing AI's speed and scale with human empathy, cultural intelligence, and inclusive collaboration, Makers of Baghdad has supported over 15,000 beneficiaries and helped launch more than 200 startups and SMEs.
Empowering BSOs to Drive Inclusive Growth through AI-Human Collaboration
The Egypt-based team of Career180, an edtech and employment platform that equips youth and women with skills and connects them to job opportunities.
The journeys of Mubarak, from a job seeker to a digital marketing leader as a refugee; Layla, from an inexperienced graduate to a classroom facilitator as a single mom; and Noor, from a Graphic Design Intern to a Communications Lead, are three of many success stories made possible through AI-human co-creations. Across the MENA region, BSOs’ impact reaches beyond individuals, transforming communities to build inclusive digital economies.
This is precisely the goal of the Tech Pathways MENA initiative. Run by Village Capital, with support from Google.org, the initiative partners with 21 BSOs across the Middle East and North Africa to help 10,000 workers gain world-class AI and digital skills, specifically targeting beneficiaries most affected by workforce transitions. Senior Program Manager Ahmed Fadl reflects, “Thanks to the dedication of our local and regional partners, more than 15,000 participants registered for the course within the first two month alone, a powerful sign of both the eagerness for opportunity and the vital role BSOs play.”
But just as BSOs support others with opportunities to grow, they, too, need support to grow. Through new funding, partnerships, and strong networks, we can amplify BSO’s impact, open doors to AI and digital skills training, and give every community an equitable chance to thrive.
We invite you to join us in building an inclusive digital economy for all across MENA. Connect with us today.
