Tarneem Saeed

Tarneem Saeed is a Sudanese Tech entrepreneur, she is also a lawyer and is leading one of the most exciting digital transformations in Sudan. She is the founder and CEO of Alsoug, the country’s largest online marketplace, which helps people buy and sell goods and services easily.

Quotes

• People and businesses weren’t harnessing the full power of the internet. Tarneem on the problems she saw that led to the creation of Alsoug

• "There are places I can’t go to and have to rely on male employees to go there. For example, I can’t go to the car market because it’s a male-dominated market and women aren’t taken seriously there.”Tarneem on the challenges women in Tech face

• “The beauty of the online classifieds platform, however, is that it doesn’t require heavy tech, and you can do a lot on it while keeping costs fairly low.” [1]

• “You’re having a conversation with someone and you realise they haven’t used Google before. And you say, ‘how do you search for stuff?’ and they reply ‘I asked someone or I saw a post on Facebook or a message on WhatsApp’. But the ideal going and doing a search on Google is not something everyone just knows here which is crazy because the first thing in this internet age is people know how to search." [2]

• “We have a good entrepreneurial spirit and now that the ecosystem is being improved, I think that entrepreneurial spirit is going to mean that change is going to come very rapidly.” [3]

• “What I find very inspirational is the fact that notwithstanding all of this, when you speak to young Sudanese, they are incredibly keen to access the outside world. Wherever they are able to, they are doing it. Even though things like games platforms for example, if they get access to them, they play them. Their capacity to learn tech and start using tech is crazy.”[4]

• “Generally, even in the corporate space, there is just not a lot of women actually. And it’s a shame because Sudanese women are very strong, they are very independent, they participate a lot in society. So we have them in senior roles but both in government and in the corporate world, there is not enough of them in the final decision-making positions." [5]

• “That’s actually what we became very good at. We basically learned to build technology to get around the limitations. We built a lot of stuff ourselves. We couldn’t rely on other software solutions often because they weren’t working. We just kept building more and more workarounds and more and more of our own things. even things like SMS gateways, in most countries a startup will never bother about building its own SMS gateway as they will just probably plug in to something. But here we built our own. So we just had to be ingenious about that.” [6]