Khaled Al Sabawi is a Canadian entrepreneur of Palestinian origin and Founder and President of MENA Geothermal and TABO Palestine. The son of Palestinian refugees from Gaza, he received his degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada in 2006 and later became the first certified Geothermal Engineer in the ArabMiddle East Khaled was named "One of the World's Top Energy Entrepreneurs" by Global Post in 2010, and was ranked the 195th Most Influential Arab by Arabian Business Magazines in their Top 500 Most Influential Arabs ranking for 2012. In 2013, Khaled received the prestigious Takreem Award for Young Entrepreneur at their highly publicized awards ceremony in Paris, France. In October 2014, Khaled was featured on the cover of Forbes Middle East with the caption beside his picture reading "Industry of the Impossible" in Arabic along with the a feature article titled "The Good Deed" in English. On November 25, 2014 Khaled received the prestigious Young Alumni Achievement Medal from the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering in Canada, one of the most renowned faculties of engineering in the world. In 2015 Khaled was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. As part of MENA Geothermal, a green energy business, Khaled installed the first geothermal systems in Palestine in 2007. MENA Geothermal was a two-time winner of the Energy Globe Award in 2008 and 2011 and has installed the largest geothermal system in the Middle East at the American University of Madaba in Jordan. Khaled's TABO initiative, Arabic for "title deed," is a development project which is part of Union Construction and Investment, one of the largest real-estate development companies in Palestine. It offers affordable, registered plots of residential land in the West Bank. It is a response to the increasing cost of land purchase in Palestine and also protects land against Israeli annexation through title deed registration. In March 2014, while still managing MENA Geothermal and UCI, Khaled became a Managing Director and Board Member of Predacity Capital Management, a pure-play hedge fund manager that delivers high returning hedge fund management services. Predacity manages its flagship Predacity Emerging MarketsHigh Yield Bond Fund Ltd, a BVI licensed Professional Fund that applies a deep value and bottom up approach to risk-adjusted return maximization by exploiting capital market inefficiencies. In 2010, Khaled gave a speech at the TEDxRamallah Conference, titled "Keeping Palestine Cool: A Different Kind of Underground Movement" went viral on YouTube influencing roughly 92,000 viewers. Khaled has lectured about entrepreneurship and renewable energy at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, McGill University, and the University of Toronto.
Political Views
Khaled has spoken about Israel's "campaign of entry denials and visa restrictions directed towards foreign nationals working in Palestine," citing his denial of entry by Israel three times in the span of seven months in 2009. Khaled has also spoken out against the negative impact that the "massive amount of foreign aid that is injected into the Palestinian economy, now totaling 30 percent of the Palestinian GDP" has had on the development of an independent economy. Among other things, he argues foreign aid undermines the Palestinian private sector's ability to recruit educated Palestinian professionals.
