Farida El Agamy runs the Tharawat Family Business Forum, an independent association for family-owned companies in the Middle East and North Africa. Last month the Dutch-Egyptian launched the “Women in Family Business” initiative to examine the effect women have on family-owned firms as leaders, mothers, wives and daughters.
Can you explain what the Tharawat Business Forum is?
My father founded the forum together with 15 families from the region to create a network to focus on best practice for family businesses in the Arab world. In 2008, he asked me to join him and to set up Tharawat in the UAE as our headquarters. Most of our founding members were in Gulf countries so we thought it would make sense to set up in Dubai.
What does “Tharawat” mean?
It’s the plural of wealth but it signifies all kinds of wealth, not just material wealth.
Why launch the Women in Family Business initiative now?
Since 2011, we have held an annual event called the Continuum Family Business Conference, which is a gathering of family businesses of all sizes from all over the world. We increasingly had more families from Latin America joining. At one of the events we had a lady who spoke about her role as an in-law – her husband is a family business member/owner – and it was very interesting to see the reaction: people from all over the world were really touched by this. We’ve always emphasised that not every member of the family, be they male or female, has to be an active manager; the make-up of a successful family business comes with very different roles for each individual because if you have strong harmony with members of the family who are not involved that can already be a strong basis for the sustainability of your business. Nevertheless, everyone influences the decision-making whether it’s visible or invisible. We came away from that session and said it would actually be worth looking at women and their visible and invisible roles.
How was the inaugural women’s event?
We wanted to have a brainstorming session to see what topics are really of concern. We’ve seen a lot of initiatives for women in business in general and we want to make sure that we are not just adding a similar project. We want to avoid being seen as a typical organisation that would push for more women on boards or more women in management. For a family business to be successful and sustainable, the involvement of the family members has to be organic and that requires dialogue about certain topics. We want to highlight these topics through input from women from all over the world who write about their experiences, their ideas, about what it means to be involved as a board member, or simply as a family member who is in charge of the social membership of the family. For example, we have a woman who created a mentoring programme inside her family business. She had this opportunity that she would not have had otherwise to help other women by mentoring them and helping them enter the workforce. There are a lot of aspects we can explore that have maybe not been highlighted enough in the past.
Where will you go from here?
We have a great committee – very international with three academics and five family business members. Together with the committee we will produce not only content for the website and thought leadership, but also create a platform where research is republished because we feel that, internationally, the academic research on the topic is quite scattered. We would like to have a community approach so we are working on a chapter set-up where individuals would work around similar topics and feed back to the committee. We would get input from all over the world on similar topics and have a comparative view on different issues.
Final thoughts?
We are an Arab association helping to roll out an international initiative. We have seen a lot of international initiatives come to the region but very little has actually grown from the region to become global. We want to focus on fast-growth economies. In Latin America, Africa, Asia, there are lots of things that are very similar [to the Middle East] not just in terms of family structures but business structures as well. That is where we feel there is a very interesting opportunity and a gap in the research. Most research activities are being conducted in North America and Europe (with some exceptions) but 70 per cent of the world is left out and we really want to shed light on these markets that are maybe a bit harder to research.
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