Power to aspiring students

Four Qatari women have set up Graduaid, a first endeavour of its kind that aims to make
it easier and simpler for people to connect to their dream courses.

Four young Qatari women have joined hands to help aspiring students in getting admissions abroad to the universities of their choices. They have set up Graduaid, an academic consultancy firm, which they say is also their way of giving back to the society.
Community caught up with these enterprising entrepreneurs to learn more about the initiative and the motivations behind it.
“We are very new – we started our company in October 2016 and are the first of our kind, as far as we know, in Qatar. Our primary aim is to give back to the society. We want to contribute to our community. We faced a lot of problems when we were looking for suitable courses and appropriate universities. We had to do all of the documentation by ourselves. There was no one there to help us,” Sara al-Fardan, one of the founding members, said.
Sara, who has a Master’s degree in Leadership and Development from Georgetown University, added that the company was envisioned and started by five young women. Later, however, one of them had to leave and now they are four members looking after the affairs of the company.
They realised that aspiring students face a lot of problems and questions before they get admission to a suitable educational institution.
Sara said, “Interestingly, we all are eldest siblings in our families. Learning from our own experiences, we started helping our younger brothers and sisters at home in selecting the right courses and good institutions. This helped us realise that we need to have an education consultancy company to reach out our community and to provide advice.”
“There are other consultancy firms that are mostly foreign and online. We are the first to have an office and provide face-to-face coaching and guidance. Since our start, we have seen an increase in the number of students coming to us. We have not yet started to market ourselves and are relying solely on word of mouth for now. We hope to have more and more students come to us in future,” Sara added.
Dana El-Ghazal, another founding member of Graduaid, said, “Our mission is to assist students pursuing higher education by providing them academic guidance and consultancy tailored to their individual needs.”
Dana has a master’s degree in Fashion Journalism from the London College of Fashion. She adds, “We have a vision of delivering the highest quality of academic advice for all prospective students.”
She said that Graduaid provides services such as introductory consultation, comprehensive personalised profiling, shortlisting of courses and universities, advance planning, proofreading of and guidance on personal statements, advice on standardised testing, registration and result retrieval. She added that they also offer mock interviews, application review and submission of applications, help with accommodation shortlisting and student visas.
Speaking about their experience as entrepreneurs, Dana said, “We all have been friends for a long time. We studied together at school level and then we planned for our graduate and postgraduate courses together. Finally, we set up this consultancy firm together. Changing our personal relationships into business relationships has been a challenge. We are however doing good and will continue to do our best for young Qatari students.”
Ameera al-Ansari, also a founder of Graduaid, said, “We have big plans for the future. We are thinking to start corporate training for employees of different companies in Qatar. We are already in contact with some companies and are in process of materialising our idea.”
Ameera has a Master’s degree in Real Estate Development. She said that there are many big companies in Qatar and they want to train their workers. She said that these companies are on the lookout for experts to provide corporate training to their employees.
Yara Darwish, the fourth founding member of Graduaid, holds a Master’s of Philosophy in Education from the University of Cambridge.
The entrepreneurs said that they appreciate the support that women in Qatar have been receiving from the government and from their families in obtaining further education. They were unanimous in saying that their society is fast changing with women getting higher education and getting involved in businesses of different kinds.

“There are other consultancy firms that are mostly foreign and online. We are the first to have an office and provide face-to-face coaching and guidance. Since our start, we have seen an increase in the number of students coming to us”
— Sara al-Fardan, founding member of Graduaid