Heaven Nursery
Woman entrepreneur, Eman Jassas, says she has always wanted to work in education.
My family has a history in education and a lot of my family members are educators. We have a passion for education and love it so much.
Eman is a veteran teacher with over 35 years of experience and the founder of Heaven Nursery, a nursery school in Erbil. Originally from Baghdad, Eman and her family moved to Erbil due to security concerns. Here, she worked in a school for internally displaced children, before deciding to open her own business in 2018.
“I believe many of the teaching curriculums and ways of teaching are not the best way to teach children. I realised I can start my own business and educate children in the best ways that I know,” she says about her decision to become an entrepreneur.
Heaven Nursery offers childcare and education to children aged from four months to four years and was the first nursery in Iraq to achieve international ISO certification for early childhood care and education. Eman says healthy food, clean premises, and sports and outdoor activities, are all important aspects of running a nursery school but that caring about the children who attend the school is even more important.
Caring about the child. Caring is more important than education.
Since its opening, Heaven Nursery has provided childcare services to more than 150 families. It also offers special education classes for children with mild difficulties in reading, speaking, and learning and has a licensed teacher to support autistic children. It employs nine women, including Iraqis who have fled from Mosul as well as one Syrian refugee.
Eman was planning to refurbish the school premises and expand to a second location – but COVID-19 presented an unexpected setback. The pandemic forced Heaven Nursery to close for eight months, generating no income while it continued to pay staff salaries and rent. Eman says the pandemic was a time full of unknowns as it dragged on longer than she expected.
Frustration is how I can best describe that crisis period. We lost a lot during that time. For six to nine months, we were in a very tough position.
The business remained under pressure after reopening as few parents were sending their children to nursery at that time. Earlier this year, Heaven Nursery became the first business to be granted a relief loan in the second round of Northern Iraq Investment’s (NII’s) COVID-19 SME Support Programme. The programme provides short-term business loans to existing businesses in northern Iraq to help them overcome the lingering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and preserve jobs and livelihoods. Its first round provided loans to 25 businesses to contribute to the preservation of 413 direct jobs. The second round will extend another USD 750k in financing to qualifying businesses.
The relief loan will enable Heaven Nursery to pay staff salaries for six months and will give Eman the financing she needs to proceed with the renovation of the school premises. She also plans to use the funding to expand the camera system that provides parents with a live video feed of their children while they are at school, which is a key differentiator for her business.
I like making the kids happy and seeing the parents appreciate our work. I hope I can develop the nursery to make it the best one in town and expand to other Iraqi governorates.