The UAE has spent years building one of the world’s strongest environments for starting a business. Ghizlan Guenez’s next proposition is about what comes after access: founders with the financial fluency, networks and operating discipline to build for the long term.
The UAE entered 2026 at the top of the global entrepreneurship table. It ranked first worldwide for the fifth consecutive year in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2025/2026 report, while also placing second globally for entrepreneurial finance and ease of access to funding. The strength is broad rather than cosmetic, spanning government programmes, infrastructure, market entry, research transfer and entrepreneurship education.
The founder pipeline is widening with it. In Abu Dhabi, 3,058 new economic licences were issued to Emirati businesswomen and female entrepreneurs in the first half of 2026, up 6.4 percent from the same period a year earlier. The more mature an entrepreneurship ecosystem becomes, however, the more sophisticated its questions can become. Starting is one measure. Building something capable of hiring, managing capital, adjusting its model and surviving long enough to compound experience is another.
From access to capability
That is the space Ghizlan Guenez has increasingly organised her work around. The Dubai-based entrepreneur and former finance professional founded F Force after building businesses herself, most notably luxury modest-fashion platform The Modist. Her current proposition is not simply that more women should become entrepreneurs. It is that they should enter business equipped to understand the economics underneath it.
In March 2026, Guenez told Entrepreneur Middle East that F Force’s flagship entrepreneurship programme had graduated more than 500 women, with 73 percent launching businesses within six to 18 months. “Impact without commercial success isn’t sustainable,” she said in the same interview on 6 March 2026. The sentence gets to the heart of the model: purpose can provide the reason to build, but the company still needs margins, customers, cash discipline and an operating structure strong enough to carry that purpose.
Experience becomes infrastructure
Guenez brings another asset into that proposition: experience of changing the model rather than merely defending it. The Modist developed international recognition around luxury modest fashion before closing in 2020. When the business returned in 2022, it did so differently. Vogue Business documented its shift from buying and holding stock to a marketplace model that carried no inventory, reducing the capital risk embedded in the original structure.
That distinction matters in an ecosystem as ambitious as the UAE’s. Once a market has made starting a company comparatively frictionless, founder experience itself becomes part of the infrastructure. The entrepreneur who has already confronted inventory risk, hiring decisions, fundraising, expansion and reinvention can pass down something an incorporation portal cannot: pattern recognition.
The UAE is increasingly building institutions around precisely that idea. In April 2026, the Sharjah Entrepreneurship Center launched an Entrepreneurs Resilience Fund designed to combine capital with operational and market support. The initiative is mobilising up to AED5 million through public and private partners and offers equity-free grants alongside practical assistance. By July, more than 60 SMEs and startups had received support.
Guenez, participating in Sheraa’s wider conversation around resilience, put the emphasis on what surrounds the entrepreneur: “What really matters is the environment around the founder,” she said on 28 April 2026, pointing to community, candid exchange and access to the right people.
The harder number comes later
One qualification belongs beside F Force’s early results. Its 73 percent launch rate is company-reported, and a venture created within 18 months is not yet the same thing as a company proven over five or ten years. Revenue, employment, profitability and survival will become the more revealing measures as the alumni base matures.
That is not a weakness in the UAE entrepreneurship story. It is evidence of how far the conversation has progressed. A country that already ranks first globally for its entrepreneurship environment can afford to ask the harder second-order question: what quality of companies does that environment produce?
The next competitive advantage may therefore be accumulated founder judgment. Capital, licences and programmes create the conditions for companies to appear. Mentorship and operating knowledge increase the odds that the lessons of one company are not lost before the next one begins. Guenez’s work sits inside that next phase: converting entrepreneurial access into entrepreneurial depth.
