Shafeeq Ghabra (second from left), a political science professor in Kuwait, spoke candidly about a variety of subjects, saying that America should elect a strong leader as president in 2008.  Mr. Ghabra has been featured on numerous television news programs in the U.S., including “Hannity & Colmes” and “Hardball.”  Left to right: Nader Sultan, Mr. Ghabra, Rola Dashti, Youssef Al Ebraheem, Abdul Al-Shatti and  Haila Al-Mekaimi. photos by Trevor Williams

Ms. Dashti, the first woman elected as head of the Kuwait Economic Society and one of the first female parliamentary candidates, wears a shirt with a message befitting her activist mission: Half democracy, no democracy.

Kuwait’s government-owned energy sector has fueled rapid economic growth in the small Persian Gulf nation, but its private sector is looking at least partly to the American market for investment to create jobs and lasting prosperity, Rola Dashti, chairperson for the Kuwait Economic Society, told GlobalAtlanta.

Home to an estimated 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves, Kuwait’s gross domestic product has soared on rising oil prices in the past five years, growing at a rate of about 10 percent per year, Ms. Dashti said.

And although projected investments in the energy sector of nearly $65 billion promise to sustain the boom over the next five-year period, oil is not the only economic opportunity Kuwait has to offer, she added. 

““In addition to the state being rich, the private sector is also rich,” said Ms. Dashti, a women’s rights activist who in 2007 became one of the first women to run for parliament in Kuwait.  The Kuwaiti government granted suffrage to women in 2005, thanks in large part to advocates like Ms. Dashti, who are constantly pushing for advancements in democracy there.

Many Americans think of Kuwait as having only oil, but the economy is steadily diversifying, Ms. Dashti said.  Now the nation of 3 million people is home to top-rated companies in logistics and telecommunications, and the financial services industry is owned and managed by private enterprises.

The recent trend toward diversity in the private sector is less of a novelty than it is a return to Kuwait’s pre-oil roots, she added.

“Kuwait evolved on the private sector,” said Ms. Dashti, who studied at Johns Hopkins University. Before the discovery of oil in Kuwait 60 years ago, its people were traders who made a living on entrepreneurship.

With strong diplomatic ties forged by the United States’ decision to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in the early 1990s, America is primed to take advantage of the resurgence of this entrepreneurial mindset, if hurdles like lack of awareness can be overcome.

Although more than half of the American respondents surveyed by the American-Kuwaiti Alliance considered Kuwait on “friendly” terms with the United States, about one-fourth were not sure whether Kuwait invaded Iraq, or vice versa, during the early 1990s.

Ms. Dashti, one of six Kuwaiti scholars and business leaders participating in the “Eye on Kuwait” tour, spoke with GlobalAtlanta prior to a town hall meeting and luncheon at Emory University that was aimed at dispelling American misconceptions about Kuwait and presenting opportunities for economic cooperation.

The three-city tour took the delegates to Washington and Chicago before Atlanta and was organized by the Washington-based alliance, a non-profit organization whose “business mandate is to enhance political, economic and cultural relations between the two countries,” said Jim LeBlanc, the alliance's executive director.

Although the delegates’ fields of expertise varied, the intense discussion and interaction with the audience often touched on economic issues, and many echoed Ms. Dashti’s view, placing emphasis on the private sector.

“The future engine of growth for our part of the world is the private sector, and that’s where I see the cooperation with American private sector companies,” said Nader Sultan, senior partner of Kuwait City-based F&N Consultancy and the former CEO of Kuwait Petroleum Corp.

Although the “energy-centric” economies of the Middle East have a responsibility to keep up production of oil for the stability of high-volume consumers like the U.S., the energy industry traditionally has not provided enough jobs to sustain an already young and steadily growing population in Kuwait.

“In Kuwait, 62 percent of the GDP comes from oil, but we only employ 12 percent of the national workforce,” Mr. Sultan said, mentioning a $3 billion Dow Chemical plant that only creates 300 jobs as an example of the need for private investment that will bring employment opportunities.

Mr. Sultan called for cooperation with American companies, asking them to bring their resources to Kuwait to help them develop the economy. 

The delegates agreed that the benefits of partnership would be mutual.

“We don’t want America to miss these opportunities,” said Abdul Majeed Al-Shatti, managing director of the Commercial Bank of Kuwait, which Mr. Al-Shatti said recently opened an office in northern Iraq. 

The other delegates included Shafeeq Ghabra, a political science professor who helped found the American University of Kuwait and also founded leadership consulting company Jusoor Arabiya; Yousef Al Ebraheem, an alliance board member and a former minister and advisor to the Amir and Haila Al-Mekaimi, an assistant political science professor at Kuwait University.