Nadine Halabi de Francesca
Head of Business Development and Operations
As Dubai Business Women Council’s Business Development Manager, Nadine helps drive business success by adopting a ‘start-up’ style of management that fosters innovation, takes advantage of new opportunities and interprets industry trends to maximize strategic objectives. Encouraging entrepreneurship is an important part of the Council’s work in inspiring women to be the best they can be. As such, she ensures that the Council is an environment in which women feel motivated to innovate, create and thrive.
Throughout her tenure at the Council, she managed to bring on board long lasting strategic partnerships with organizations and companies who share the same mission and vision, and who delivered tailor made content for exclusive workshops for the members of the Council with the main purpose of helping them develop their entrepreneurial skills.
In 2021, Nadine Halabi was nominated as one of the 50 Most Influential Women in the Region under the list of ‘Women of Influence in the Arab World 2021’ by CEO Middle East. The list was under the patronage of UN women and is both a celebration of the region’s female leaders and pioneers as well as a snapshot of the economic and social currents coursing through the contemporary Middle East.
Keeping in mind the main obstacles that entrepreneurs face on a daily basis, she was able to attend to one of the key challenges by bringing on board an exclusive opportunity for eligible members of the Council who were in dire need of Mentorship and guidance. The DBWC Mentorship Programme was launched in January 2018 for that main purpose and ran for over a period of 6 months. Since then, the programme has been taking place on an annual basis and offered an opportunity to selected members to be paired with respective mentors, who represented local and international leading companies, and were experts in diverse sectors.
Another ongoing challenge that faced entrepreneurs was not getting enough access to proper information around business set up. With that said, she has been providing the members with ongoing support by bringing industry experts who delivered exclusive and specific content around business set up and development in the form of monthly workshops and seminars that were provided exclusively to members of the Council. These workshops helped many members develop and initialize the business that they always wanted to venture in and/or helped them scale up an existing one. Nadine also launched entrepreneurial initiatives that were based on 6-week accelerator programmes and which focused on helping chosen applicants set up a business of their own.
Through her demonstrated intrapreneurial approach to business, Nadine is considered in a strong position to continue charting the course of helping working women in Dubai develop their skills and abilities.
