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

Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon

Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.

Published

2 weeks ago

August 27, 2026

Dana Saadeh

visa's return to syria starts with a test and a bank in lebanon

Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.

The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.

Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc

— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026

“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.

Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.

Also Read: Lebanon’s 5G Era Begins With 150 Stations And A $1M Budget

The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.

Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.