Almost 11 years after the start of the revolution, Libya is still scrapping itself for parts to build its worn-out economy back to health — and the country’s baby startup ecosystem is playing a painstaking role in the effort.

When Ammar Hamid moved back to Libya in 2017 after over eight years of studying and living in the UK, he met an entirely different country from the one he left. The uprising had come and gone, but the remnants of its dark cloud still loomed over the oil-rich Maghreb country. Hamid said he met a pitifully fragmented state filled with monuments of half-bombed buildings and institutions. From Tripoli, the country’s capital city, to Benghazi, the country’s second most important city that hosts its largest industries and government ministries, apartments through which winter cold and summer heat easily slip in through the many bullet holes in their walls laced the street. People were helplessly living in fear, and the nation’s oil-relying economy had almost completely lost its bearing. According to the World Bank, Libya's gross domestic product per capita declined from an unmatched comfort of $12,000 in 2010 to $3,700 in 2022, recording a 70% drop in just a decade.

But amid this chaos, a small startup ecosystem began to emerge. The internet penetration in the country was (and still is) the highest in the Maghreb region, standing at 75%, and this helped fuel the rise of, though primitive, a foundational and pivotal phase of a new digital business in the country. Hopeful founders are building startups to solve serious problems, make life easy for the people and add economic value to the country. One such startup is iStudy, an ed-tech app connecting parents with schools. It was launched in 2017 by Zakaria Gwaila and Waleed Sassi who noticed the increasing rate of student failure since the 2011 revolution and decided to use their app to address and correct that. The app allows parents to follow their child’s school activities like attendance, lessons and exam schedules, and send and receive private messages to and from the school — messages that before the app were inefficient due to their paper- and SMS-based nature. The company has since expanded out of Tripoli, where it was founded, to other cities like Albayda, Ejdabya, Al Khoms and Benghazi — with the ambition to cover all of Libya and North Africa.

Hamid, who — like the vast majority of Libyans — prefers to work for the public sector, started his civil service career the same year he returned. But he quickly got bored and quit to start a business consulting firm that helped small businesses learn and practice best managerial processes. After all, he studied business management up to the master's level in the UK and wasn’t ready to waste all this high-end education, especially “not in Libya where there were so many problems begging to be solved.” But his consulting startup was met with little success so he threw in the towel to join Food House, one of Libya’s biggest FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) companies, as a marketing manager and stayed there for a little over three years.