Soraya Salti (Social Entrepreneur/Young Arab Leader)

As senior vice-president of MENA for Junior Achievement Worldwide, Soraya Salti has the mandate to mobilize private sectors and ministries of education across the Arab World to join forces to create a new generation of business-oriented youth and entrepreneurs.     
 
Salti took over a floundering educational non-governmental organization program in Jordan — INJAZ — in 2001 and turned it into a national entity that now reaches 68,000 students a year, with the help of 1,500 volunteer teachers from the private sector and 80 corporations.

Raising her sights to the regional level in 2004, she has since led the expansion of INJAZ into 12 Arab countries and brought INJAZ to more than 300,000 Arab youth.

Salti has been recognized as a 2006 Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year and as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. In 2009, she received a Skoll Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship.

Here she is making a short acceptance speech:

Salti worked two years at Jordan’s Ministry of Planning on the innovative Competitiveness Team, assisting Harvard’s Michael Porter to apply his model to strengthen the country’s economic development. She then joined Northwestern University’s international Kellogg executive MBA program.

Prior to that she ran the monitoring/evaluation unit of a $15 million program that strengthened small and medium-sized industries at Jordan US Business Partnership, before which she was an economic researcher in ESCWA, the UN Economic & Social Commission for Western Asia.
 
She is on the board of Young Arab Leaders Jordan, Queen Rania’s Awards for Excellence in Education, and the Business Development Center.

Related links:
INJAZ
www.skollfoundation.org