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Open for business

Abdellah Aboulharjan gets young French immigrants off the streets and helps turn them into entrepreneurs.

It wasn’t the first outburst of despair, and it wouldn’t be the last. Late last year, fresh riots broke out in Villiers-le-Bel, a half-hour drive north of Paris. Nearly every day now, French papers tell of uprisings near Paris or in the poorer neighbourhoods of cities like Marseille, Dijon, Lyon and Toulouse. Many fear the same unrest could be brewing in cities around Europe.

Through Jeunes Entrepreneurs, Aboulharjan—who, with his light fringe of beard and thin-rimmed glasses, has a rather intellectual look—is trying to provide young people with a more productive outlet for their energy by encouraging entrepreneurship and economic development in the country’s 700 official quartiers sensibles, or problem neighbourhoods.

In the 1960s, many immigrants to France got jobs in the car factories of Peugeot, Citroën and Renault. The Moroccans, who came from Berber villages near the port city of Agadir, settled in the depressing apartment blocks in Val Fouré, a section of Mantes-la-Jolie where youth gangs gathered under plane trees lining dusty squares. The immigrants’ wives and children followed under the family reunification program. Aboulharjan’s father had been working in the Renault factory for 15 years by the time he was able to bring Abdellah, then 9, to France.

“I didn’t speak a word of French,” Aboulharjan remembers. In school, he struggled to keep up, but his parents continued to push him, his three brothers and two sisters to learn, and Aboulharjan got his bac, or high school diploma. He studied communications at the Technical University in Évry, south of Paris, where he learned another way of thinking and working: “We barely knew the Western world; we played and messed around in our own little Moroccan world.”

One of Aboulharjan’s uncles had a greengrocer’s shop, while another had a butcher’s shop. Aboulharjan worked at both and considers those experiences the springboard to his own entrepreneurial spirit. When he wanted to set up telephone shops for immigrants in 1997—during the privatization of the former French telephone monopoly France Télécom—his uncles put up $10,000 in starting capital. The shops became a resounding success. Two years later, Aboulharjan started ­medinashop.com, an online retailer for handmade Moroccan products, with his own money. He left the telephone business to his brothers, who had meanwhile set up a telephone company as well as a travel agency in Morocco.

His success didn’t go unnoticed. In 2002, Aboulharjan was chosen as one of the first recipients of Talents des Cités, a prize awarded by the Ministry for Urban Development and the Senate to offer moral support to enterprising young immigrants. Winners were lauded with the title “ambassador of success.” Their task was to guide future winners. Aboulharjan took this assignment very seriously; that same year, together with Aziz Senni, he set up Jeunes Entrepreneurs.

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