News

Mastercard & Women Choice Launch Social Innovation Incubator

The new partnership will create employment opportunities for 1 million female entrepreneurs and help to drive economic growth across the MENA region.

Published

3 years ago

April 11, 2023

Nour Nasir

Mastercard

Women Choice, an international organization dedicated to female personal and professional development, has partnered with Mastercard to launch a new program called the “Social Innovation Incubator (SII) For Women’s Employment”. The scheme will help to create employment opportunities for women across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) while also boosting economic growth and development in the region.

Over the next five years, the Women Choice and Mastercard partnership will provide comprehensive support and employment opportunities for MENA women through a program of mentorship that will encompass business planning, HR, and recruitment.

“We are excited to launch this program and to have the support of a global organization like Mastercard, which is genuinely committed to bringing change and improving the situation of women in the workplace,” says Nezha Alaoui, Founder & CEO of Women Choice.

Also Read: UAE Digital Technology Spending To Hit $20 Billion By 2026

Nezha Alaoui will also form part of the jury on the second edition of Mastercard’s Women SME Leaders Awards. The card provider has been at the forefront of several equitable and inclusivity-based projects in recent years. The new Woman Choice collaboration will provide substantial employment support for MENA women and directly place at least 1,000 female entrepreneurs in their respective enterprises.

The incubator program will first launch in the UAE and Morocco, with the whole MENA region eventually benefitting from the business initiatives and training. SII for Women Employment also aligns well with Mastercard’s commitment to add 25 million women entrepreneurs to the global digital economy by 2025 as part of a broader push towards a more sustainable and equitable world.

News

Instagram Now Lets You Tune Its Algorithm, But There’s One Big Catch

The new controls promise users “agency” over their feed, but asking to see more from accounts you actually follow returns an error.

Published

3 days ago

June 11, 2026

Nour Nasir

Instagram

Instagram has expanded its algorithm personalization feature to the main feed, letting users specify which topics they want surfaced more or less often in recommendations.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri framed the change as a matter of user control. “I believe it’s in our best interest as a business to empower people to shape Instagram into something that works for them, and that people should be able to have a meaningful amount of agency over the products they spend so much time in,” he wrote on Threads.

Though it turns out that agency has limits. The controls only accept interest-based topics, such as “rescue dogs” or “parenting humor”. Requesting “posts from people I follow” returns no results, which is obviously a sore point for creators whose posts rarely reach their own audiences. Mosseri conceded the tension: “Who you follow used to be a meaningful tool people had for shaping their own experience, and as recommendations took over the main feed that tool quietly stopped working”.

Also Read: How To Find & Cancel Pending Instagram Requests

Instagram credits large language models for making its algorithms legible enough to personalize, and says it is “actively working on supporting requests for people, different moods or vibes, content types, and more” – potentially leading to a fully “bespoke” version of the app.