Taweel speaks at the 2010 Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in Washington. When Waed Al-Taweel started a business, she had no idea what entrepreneurship was. For a secondary-school contest, she started a company that managed special events and called it Teen Touch. Al Taweel hired 28 classmates to send out invitations, rent facilities and arrange for catered food. Teen Touch organized children's birthday parties, decorated private houses and buildings in the West Bank city of Ramallah for Christmas, and opened a store to sell gifts for Valentine's Day. “We took care of all the arrangements from A to Z,” Al-Taweel said. Teen Touch won a prize as the best student company in the Palestinian Territories. It also was recognized as the 2007 best student company in the Arab world in the annual INJAZ Al-Arab Regional Company Competition. During the competition, Al-Taweel was chosen as 2007's best student executive in the Arab world. She sold her business after six months and distributed profits to investors in accordance with competition rules. When Al-Taweel went to college at Birzeit University, she already had other ideas. “I started having dreams of my future business,” she said. “I discovered that I could be a leader of a company.” In 2010, President Obama invited Al-Taweel to the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in Washington. She was the youngest participant and a speaker on the panel on youth entrepreneurship. Babson College President Len Schlesinger was so impressed with her that he offered her a scholarship to study in the master of business administration program at his school. At that time, Al-Taweel had an idea for a recreation and entertainment center for young Palestinians in the West Bank. “I want it to be a unique gathering place, to combine fun and personal growth,” Al-Taweel said. “Young Palestinians need a place like this because they have difficult lives,” she said. Al-Taweel also hopes to create jobs for her peers, who don't have many employment opportunities. Al-Taweel knows that it will be difficult to implement her idea. So after talking to Babson professors, she decided to focus on her studies first.“They told me I would be better prepared to develop the idea for the center when I complete my undergraduate studies,” she said. The 21-year-old entrepreneur is studying hard at Birzeit to finish her undergraduate work and be ready to enroll in Babson's graduate program. “What happened in the last three years was overwhelming,” she said. “It has helped me realize what I want to do in the future.” And what she wants to do is to be an entrepreneur. Because she believes that this way she can achieve her full potential. “But I am still at the beginning of the entrepreneurial path,” Al
