With few goods, or people, allowed to cross the border, the pool of customers and employees in Gaza is small. Web-based startups are giving those with bright ideas a chance to expand their horizons and their businesses

Gaza and Uber aren’t the likeliest of combinations. The latter is a ride-sharing app, valued this week at $40bn (£25.6bn), that relies on its users owning smartphones. The former is a recovering war zone with no 3G network. Safe to say, Uber won’t be expanding in to Gaza any time soon.

Which is just as well, because it would face spirited local competition. This summer, a young Gazan entrepreneur released her own ride-sharing application called Wasselni, which allows Gazans to find nearby taxi drivers and car-driving Facebook friends when connected to a Wi-Fi network. It will also soon work offline: type a cafe’s name into Wasselni, and you will get a list of numbers for drivers and cab firms working in the neighbourhood.

It is Gaza’s lo-fi, cash-only answer to Uber – but with crucial differences. Notoriously, Uber lets you hitch a ride with any random driver; Wasselni doesn’t. You can ride-share with one of your Facebook friends, but the only strangers on the system are vetted cabbies. More symbolically, while Uber was conceived by a brash American bored of waiting for taxis in the San Francisco rain, Wasselni was dreamed up by Mariam Abultewi, then a 22-year-old refugee waiting for a lift in the middle of the Gaza strip.

“I live in al-Nuseirat refugee camp,” says Abultewi, now 25, and one of Gaza’s first female CEOs. “Drivers spend a lot of time there trying to find the right passenger, and the passengers spend a long time in the street waiting for the right taxi.”

The idea of Wasselni soon followed, and, three years on, the startup has around 2,000 subscribers and about 70 vetted drivers, who all pay a proportion of their Wasselni-linked earnings back to the company. There might have been more by now, but this summer’s war meant Wasselni lost a lot of the momentum it built up in the spring.

It is just one example of how hard it can be to do business in Gaza. The Israeli and Egyptian blockade means few goods can cross the border, and very few people can either. Electricity is available for only a few hours a day, and during the war, it was completely cut. The pool of customers, employees and mentors inside the enclave is shallow, and doing business outside it often seems beyond the realms of possibility.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ahmed Borai: ‘Gaza Sky Geeks taught me to think differently.’ Photograph: Patrick Kingsley for the Guardian

“If you’re an entrepreneur in Gaza, you can think about surviving here,” says Ahmed Borai, a 25-year-old Gazan with his own online business. “But you can’t think about working outside. It’s something foggy. You can’t imagine a market out there that you can’t see.”

Smugglers in the south of Gaza used to get under the blockade – quite literally – by paying Egyptian partners to import all kinds of consumer goods into Egypt, and onwards into the enclave through a vast network of tunnels.

“We got used to ordering stuff from China,” says one smuggler of kitchen appliances, “and having it arrive within 25 days.” But even that lifeline stopped this year, after the Egyptian government began systematically to destroy the underground trade routes.

But as the example of Wasselni suggests, increasing numbers of young Gazans are piercing the blockade in other ways – through web-based startups. Days before the war started this year, around 650 applied to take part in Gaza’s fourth annual startup weekend – a number that startled the organisers. “It was a shock,” says Said Hassan. “Usually, 300 or 400 apply.”

Hassan works for a group called Gaza Sky Geeks, and it is this group that is partly responsible for the rise in enthusiasm. Incongruous as it sounds, Sky Geeks is Gaza’s first startup accelerator. In a city now filled with rubble and ruins, it gives advice and office space to hundreds of would-be entrepreneurs, including the Gazan equivalent of Uber. Funded by aid agency Mercy Corps, Sky Geeks pushes them to expand their horizons beyond Gaza, and connects them to mentors from international firms such as Google.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Said Hassan, who works for Gaza’s first startup accelerator, Gaza Sky Geeks. Photograph: Patrick Kingsley for the Guardian

“We don’t have a huge success story, we don’t have a million-dollar company,” says Hassan, the group’s acceleration manager, shortly before yet another power cut hit his office this week. On a bookshelf in his workspace sit what he says are the only copies in Gaza of Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup. “But we have a success in the sense that we have changed how people think.”

Ahmed Borai is a case in point. An engineer by training, he tried to set up a business selling 3D printers. But in Gaza there was no market, and he couldn’t sell them elsewhere. So he sought guidance from Gaza Sky Geeks, which pushed him to think of ways to do something similar online.

Then 12 months ago, he had the idea of employing a network of international designers to design 3D products for customers in the US. In his first year, he has made a $25,000 profit – all through a network of clients and employees he has largely met only online.

“That kind of thinking was what Sky Geeks gave me,” says Borai. “They taught me to think differently, and then boom – I had the idea. In Gaza, we don’t have any ports, we can’t import and export, so Gaza Sky Geeks is pushing people to think of running the companies online.”

The Sky Geeks is also particularly pushing women to get involved. In conservative Gaza, girls are not encouraged to enter business.

Both Abultewi and Sky Geeks want more women to join her, and so they run a series of workshops for teenage girls. Known as Big Sister/Little Sister, it sees women such as Abultewi mentor younger students, and introduce them to entrepreneurship.

The process has already had tangible personal benefits for Abultewi. Initially, when she asked her father for permission to leave Gaza for her first business trip, he didn’t respond. But he eventually agreed, and now encourages her to involve her siblings in the work. In fact, he even has a startup idea of his own now.

“We have a traditional way of thinking about women here,” says Abultewi. “Women are expected to be nurses, or teachers or mothers. But we can give them new hope.”

Additional reporting by Ameera Ahmed