News

MENA Job Seekers Can Obtain Career Certificates & Scholarships From Google

For job seekers who only speak Arabic, Google has added 5 additional digital skills courses to help them acquire even more digital skills.

Published

5 years ago

August 21, 2021

Joanna Melki

Google

The tech industry has an insatiable appetite for skilled employees, and universities don’t produce nearly enough graduates to meet it. The result is a global talent shortage, which has recently reached a 15-year high, with 69% of employers globally struggling to find employees with the right blend of technical skills and human strengths.

Now, Google is offering to sponsor over 7,000 scholarships for its Career Certificates program in the Middle East and North Africa as part of the Grow Stronger with Google initiative.

The certificates included in the program are aimed at job seekers with no prior IT experience, and their goal is to help them cultivate the skills they need to find employment in the following four major fields: IT support, project management, UX design, and data analytics.

To reach a wide range of participants, several local organizations are helping to distribute the scholarships, including:

Amideast in Lebanon
Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC) and the Higher College of Technology in the UAE
Egyptian Banking Institution (EBI) and the University Center for Career Development (UCCD)
Gaza Sky Geeks in Palestine
General Commission for Audiovisual Media (GCAM) and the Human Resources Development Fund (HRDF) in Saudi Arabia
The Agency for Digital Development (ADD) in Morocco

Google’s certificates can be obtained even without a scholarship through self-paced programs on Coursera.org. It’s then up to individual employers to recognize them.

Also Read: Mastercard Plans To Say Goodbye To Magnetic Stripes In 2024

For job seekers who only speak Arabic, Google has added five additional digital skills courses to Maharat min Google, helping them acquire even more digital skills needed to thrive in today’s digital world.

Google’s initiative is part of the global education trend of placing greater emphasis on practical skills and using modern digital tools to obtain them. This trend reflects the fact that traditional universities have limited capacity and have trouble keeping with the rapidly evolving needs of the tech industry.

News

Samsung And Spotify Offer Free Premium Deal In MENA

Nearly seven in ten streams in the region come from 18-to-34-year-olds — the audience Samsung is hoping to entice into its ecosystem.

Published

5 days ago

August 7, 2026

Nour Nasir

Samsung

Samsung has announced a partnership with Spotify spanning the Middle East, North Africa, and Türkiye, bundling Spotify Premium with select devices across its ecosystem. The headline offer — up to four months of Premium for free — is a first for the region.

Customers in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Türkiye who buy any OLED or 98-inch television, or any Galaxy S or Z series mobile device, get four months of Spotify Premium. The offer, tiered by market and device, is available at retail and on Samsung.com, and redeemed through the Samsung Promotion and Samsung Members apps.

For Samsung, the strategy is less about free music than about lock-in. The Korean tech giant’s pitch is continuity: a track starts on a Galaxy smartphone through Galaxy Buds on the commute, moves to a Samsung TV and soundbar in the living room, and stays controllable from a Galaxy Watch. The more seamlessly music travels between those devices, the harder it becomes to swap any one of them for a rival’s.

“Technology should bring people closer to the things they love, and few things connect people the way music does,” said Omar Saheb, Regional VP of Marketing and Online Business at Samsung Electronics MENA. The partnership, he added, gives customers “a genuine reason to choose Samsung for the experience, not only the product”.

Also Read: Shokz OpenFit Pro Review: Open-Ear Audio Finally Grows Up

For subscribers, Premium brings the usual package: ad-free listening, offline downloads, richer audio quality on Galaxy Buds and Samsung sound devices, and Jam, which lets friends build a shared queue.

“At Spotify, we are always working to make every listening moment feel more personal, meaningful, and worth it,” said Rami Jamal, Head of Partnerships at Spotify for South Asia, Middle East, and Africa.

The demographics go a long way to explaining the strategy. Across MENA, Türkiye, and Pakistan, nearly seven in ten Spotify streams come from listeners aged 18 to 34, according to the company — precisely the audience Samsung wants inside its hardware ecosystem before buying habits harden.