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We are excited to announce our first feature in Bloomberg Businessweek magazine! Read the article below or check out the original complete version by Sommer Saadi here.

B-School Startups: Arabic Made Easy

While growing up in Scotland, Jinanne Tabra struggled to learn Arabic. The textbooks used in her weekly lessons couldn’t keep her attention. So years later, when Tabra’s mother, a librarian at an elementary school in Qatar, complained over dinner one night about her students’ lack of interest in Arabic books, Tabra wasn’t surprised. She was inspired.

“I realized if it was hard to get kids to read Arabic in an Arab country, kids overseas didn’t stand a chance,” Tabra says. “There needed to be a go-to website where people around the world could find out about and order all the best materials for learning Arabic.”

That night, Tabra bought the domain name Araboh.com. “I chose the name Araboh because the ‘oh’ is a form of endearment in the Arab world,” Tabra says. “As a child, my friends often called me Jinannoh, a child named Ahmed might be nicknamed Ahmedoh. I wanted the name to reflect that family-like closeness and that sense of community.”

She spent the next six months using lessons from business classes and guidance from her professors to prepare for the live launch of the site in July 2008, a few months after she graduated from Carnegie Mellon’s Qatar campus. By 2010, Tabra had tripled the revenue earned from book sales on the site.

In its current state, Araboh.com lists thousands of books, ranging from translations of popular American titles to original Arab stories to textbooks and worksheets, printed by more than 30 publishers around the world. Every book has been vetted and ranked by a member of the Araboh team on how entertaining, engaging, and practical it is in teaching Arabic. Visitors can also find step-by-step learning guides, advice on what materials to start with, and interactive activities to complement text lessons.

Pittsburgh to Doha

The entrepreneurship bug bit Tabra while she was a business administration student at the Carnegie Mellon’s Qatar campus in Doha. She chose CMU because she wanted to stay close to her family. The university, which provides the same curriculum and many of the same professors as the main campus in Pittsburgh, offered full-time, English-language undergraduate degree programs in business and computer science. “I didn’t feel like I lost anything from the Pittsburgh experience,” Tabra says. “The cross-campus connection is tight.”

She enrolled in Dr. George White’s Intro to Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation classes her senior year and says White has become an ongoing mentor for her and the company. “He said people shouldn’t start a business for the sake of starting a business, but to do things that make meaning,” Tabra says. “We do that at Araboh.”

White, not surprisingly, agrees. “(Jinanne) is setting a good example for the right reasons to go into business,” White says. “In my class, I tried to focus the lessons on why someone should start a business. The motive is not always about making money. I used examples that involved people who stumbled upon fortunes only because they wanted to change the world. I think Jinanne really took that lesson to heart.”

Another important class for Tabra was a course offered sophomore year, Business Communication, where she learned how to  manage and talk with staff effectively. She says every lesson learned in class has come into practice while working with her 13 employees.

Hard-to-Find Titles

Araboh.com is a distribution site not unlike Amazon, except the team is a lot more involved with the inventory. “We’re not just a middleman,” Tabra says. She and her team work with publishers to ensure the quality of the product. A lot of the publishers they work with have the best materials for teaching Arabic but not the savviest technology or marketing techniques. “When we started out three years ago, many of our publishers had to call and fax because they didn’t even have e-mail,” she says.

But because the publishers’ products were top-notch and underdistributed, Tabra knew stocking some of the hard-to-find titles would give her site a competitive edge.

Inventory is kept in a warehouse in Qatar, but the headquarters is now in Boston. Deliveries have been made to more than 50 countries around the world. Although they sell to a lot of individuals interested in the language, more than three-quarters of revenue comes from institutions around the world looking to augment their libraries and classrooms with Arabic educational materials.

Aside from her first year out of school, when Tabra worked as a staff member at Carnegie Mellon, she has been able to focus solely on her duties as chief executive and managing director. Now, with the help of her employees, she’s maintaining the growing business and working toward a master’s degree in international education policy at Harvard University.

Tabra says: “This degree, like my business degree, will only make me more prepared to lead this company.”

Horouf, a program launched by Kalimat publishing, aims to develop the Arabic curriculum and resources for teachers in Arabic schools, in order to improve children's Arabic language skills. The program was designed in consultation with educators and is rooted in the experiences and opinions of teachers, based on their first-hand knowledge of children's learning habits, needs, and interests.

UAE education professionals have commended the outcomes of the first phase of Hurouf's implementation, launched in early 2011 under the direction of Kalimat's Founder and CEO HE Sheikha Bodour bint Sultan Al Qasimi. The program was piloted in 32 schools, and training workshops were provided to 51 teachers.

Sheikha Bodour explains the importance of quality Arabic language education, saying, "The Hurouf programme was launched with a focus on promoting the Arabic language as a key element of the national Arab identity, and is central to enhancing national identity and raising children who are proud of their Arab roots."

A study conducted by a team of educators and specialists at the same time as the implementation showed the programme to be suitable for children with different abilities and needs, and easy for teachers to implement.

According to Fatima Bu Taweel, an Instructor at the Sharjah Educational Zone, the layout and production of the material made it easy to apply and use, and very engaging for students. "It is important to offer children a range of creative activities, and the teachers' guidebook describes a number of methods and activities appropriate for children."

Kalimat continues to work on implementing several programmes that will strengthen children's relationship with their rich language and culture throughout the UAE and the Arab world.

A guest post from Nida'a Moghrabi (@supernido)

Growing up in the eighties, I remember enjoying the Arabic books published by "Al-Maktabah Al-Khadra'". I read the stories until I memorized them. But I'm not here to talk about my experience, I'm here to talk about my daughter Mariyah's. Living in the US makes the whole idea of introducing her to books so easy and full of fun. We read at home and play/read at the bookstore, we attend story-telling there too! It's one of her favourite places to go to.

Most of the English books Mariyah has were given to her as gifts by mothers or friends who have read the same books when they were little.

Reading to Mariyah -and to her baby sister Selma- is something sacred. I make sure I read to them both at separate times, and sometimes together. Mariyah loves reading and memorizing whole pages from different books. She "helps" me reading and she "fixes" my mistakes too. That's kind of fun.

Then at some point teaching her the Arabic alphabet was not enough. I always wondered how I could make her enjoy the language and actually love it and be proud of it and it's beauty. I had in mind that once she turns 5 I'm going to get her the Jordanian schools' Arabic curriculum books.

And then something beautiful happened!

I discovered Arabic children's books by Kalimat Publishing. I fell in love with their books and wondered why we weren't this lucky when we were kids. I mean Look...

In addition to many others, I got her this book because she LOVES the moon. She is the happiest when she spots it during day time, I mean in daylight. She knows that once the moon is up, it's time to sleep and when the sun is up she knows the moon goes to Amman and so tete has to go to bed.

Aaaaand I got her this one, this particular one for a very VERY special occasion that I won't talk about here now...But I will do so soon soon insha'Allah :)

These books are worth a lot in our home. She only knows about the 1st book so far. She enjoys reading her book over and over and OVER again! I'm giving her the second one as a gift tomorrow after her Ballet class.

They also worth a lot because the shipment from the Middle East was fairly costly. But to be honest, it's all worth it. The books themselves are really affordable. The material they're made of and the drawings/coloring, the simple and fun stories, the finishing, the covers...everything about them is beautiful.

I'm just glad I got them and I'm glad my little girl loves her books. She asked us about دولاب الهواء، السكاكر و الأراجيح so we took her to San Mateo County Fair where she experienced the whole thing herself. Now she can't wait for Eid!

Neither can I. Because I promised her a beautiful pair of blue shoes for next Eid, just like in one of her stories...

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You can browse similar books by Kalimat publishing in our bookstore, and catch up with Nida'a at her blog - www.jeedos.com