SPARK is a Dutch international non-profit organization with more than 100 employees working within 15 conflict-prone regions and its impact in the Middle East, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe. Spark supports, believes in, and supports economic and social change since its establishment 25 years ago and up to now, as it has developed an approach that integrates the private and government sectors in building environments to enable young people to grow, strengthen local economies and rebuild societies by opening paths for young people in general and women and refugees in particular, for study. And development and opening training to help them in the development of their own projects, especially in fragile societies where their success is.
The Spark Training Program is a program directed at the owners of emerging projects in Iraq, and it is a grant with a three-month developmental training program, in which many projects aspiring to development have participated, as it opened the door for applications in the middle of the Corona pandemic in 2020,
The beginnings of Nakhla in SPARK were when the door to apply for the training program was opened, and after a period of interviews, evaluation and communication, Nakhla was able to win this scholarship after announcing the results of acceptance in November of 2020, and a contract was signed to receive the grant in February 2021, and Nakhla is currently in The training phase, which will last for 3 months, in which Nakhla trains a group of young people to work within the private sector within an intensive training program on entrepreneurship and how to study the market and prepare intensive market studies and feasibility studies and how to calculate each small and large detail within the framework of the work In emerging projects to achieve the mission and vision that the project aspires to.
Nakhla has attracted Spark’s attention from the beginning as Spark was very welcoming and encouraging to our team, and what increased our chance to be nominated to win this grant is the clarification of our ambitions and desire in the field of transformation and technological development, as Nakhla is an agricultural project that aspires to be the first Agri-Tech startup In Iraq, “The Use of Technology in Agriculture” Therefore, SPARK helped Nakhla to identify weaknesses, how to overcome them, strengths and how to develop them.
The technological development during the period of the training showed a very noticeable changes and developments on our team as it received training in various fields that would develop Nakhla and consolidate its goal in creating mobile and web application concerned with palm trees,
as Nakhla’s representatives in these trainings were: –
marketing and sales, Administrative Director Rawan Al-Zaidi
digitalization, Director of the Data Analysis Department, Muntather Al Kaabi
public safety, operations supervisor, Muhammad Khudair
risk management, Executive Director, Labeeb Kashif Al-Gitta
and the road is not over yet, where more and more achievements will be coming through our way of this collaboration with Spark.