What Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh can teach Silicon Valley

“What excites talent, what excites society is building on those needs,” Al-Dorasi said at the Fortune Global Forum on Sunday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

He is the founder and CEO of SILQ, the result of the April merger between Saudi business-to-business marketplace Sary, which connects small businesses with manufacturers to buy supplies, and Bangladesh’s ShopUp, which offers similar services.

Al-Durasi said that the vast majority of companies in Saudi Arabia are small and medium-sized companies, but they represent only 9% of bank lending. This is the kind of problem that young Saudi entrepreneurs are tackling – and igniting a culture of innovation there, as evidenced by SILQ. “What distinguishes us here is that we have a younger generation,” Al-Dosari said.

In fact, about 63% of Saudis and 50% of Bangladeshis are under the age of thirty, while only 30% of Americans are under the age of thirty.

Lutfi Siddiqui, special envoy for international affairs in the interim government of Bangladesh, also said at the Fortune Global Forum that his country’s young demographics are key to economic progress, drawing an oil analogy to explain how Bangladesh should leverage this advantage.

“Our crude oil is our youth, but we need refineries so we can find applications for different degrees of skills and education,” said Siddiqui, a former UBS and Barclays banker. “This is a resource that we are willing to share with the rest of the world. Because the rest of the world, in general, is getting older.”

He added that companies such as Chevron, MetLife and Yeonjun, a Korean company that makes jackets for The North Face, have all praised Bangladesh’s more business-friendly climate, which he attributed to government reforms that have made the country more flexible and responsive to foreign direct investment.

“This allowed us to convert the interest into an actual investment,” Siddiqi said.

But as investors increasingly look to emerging markets, another speaker urged them to be mindful of their perception of risk when looking at Africa in particular.

“We need to change the narrative when you talk about the African continent,” said Mbumi Madisa, CEO of Bidvest Group, a services, trading and distribution company listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. “When you talk about the African continent, look at companies on the continent and what they have achieved, and let that be your proxy.”