Giving soft loans to productive families was also deliberated upon.

Gulf Today, Staff Reporter

The Ministry of Community Development organised the "Economic and Knowledge Empowerment Lab for Productive Families", bringing together (40) participants from Emirati and Saudi productive families, a group of prominent entrepreneurs and a number of officials and specialists, held at the Youth Centre in Emirates Towers.

The lab comes as part of a joint event based on the review of current challenges and proposed solutions to adopt the best future initiatives, which support the development of productive families and ensure their sustainability and commercial competition in the long term.

The Economic and Knowledge Empowerment Lab for Productive Families came a day before the launch of the joint Emirati-Saudi Productive Families Exhibition organised by the Ministry of Community Development starting on Tuesday 11th October in cooperation with the Social Development Bank in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for 6 days during between 11-16 October 2022, at the Star Atrium in Dubai Mall, with the participation of (24) productive families divided equally between the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

The participants in the Economic and Knowledge Empowerment Lab came up with a set of recommendations, most prominently: providing local business incubators for integrated services to support entrepreneurs "from a productive family to projects", involving investors in productive family projects by supporting them with funds, providing productive families with soft loans that support their continuity and production, encouraging young talents to develop their projects, working to provide a strategy, regulations and laws that guarantee the rights of productive families, organising training courses, workshops and incentive initiatives, and empowering productive families in the field of raising the quality products.

 The participants also discussed providing a unified marketing platform for their products at a GCC level.

The participants in the Empowerment Lab also stressed the importance of enabling Emirati-Saudi productive families to participate in joint exhibitions between the two countries, create an Emirati-Saudi productive families’ brand, provide a unified marketing platform for their products at a GCC level, support productive families to market their products at government authorities, ensure the virtual marketing of those products, encourage random projects to engage in the market and support their marketing through smart applications for distribution and delivery.

During the Economic and Knowledge Empowerment Lab for Productive Families, the participants were divided into five groups, to discuss three main pillars: economic sustainability and competitiveness of microenterprises, promising and innovative opportunities for microenterprises, inflation and its impact on the future of microenterprises.

The participating groups in the Economic and Knowledge Empowerment Lab reviewed and analysed the challenges focusing on the most prominent challenges according to each sub-theme, and examining current and proposed future initiatives, brainstorming output and recommendations.

The Economic and Knowledge Empowerment Lab for Emirati and Saudi Productive Families was held according to a working mechanism based on government innovation tools within the Innovative Ideas through the presentation of ideas and development of possible scenarios related to the discussion of these challenges to reach the best solutions, proposals and innovative initiatives.