by Gulay Ozkan, February 20, 2013<\/p>\n
![\"bedriye_med\"](\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/bedriye_med.png\")
Entrepreneurship in Turkey is being celebrated on the global stage once again, as the\u00a0World Economic Forum\u2019s\u00a0Schwab Foundation\u00a0has just awarded\u00a0Bedriye Hulya\u00a0an award for\u00a0Social Entrepreneur of the Year.\u00a0Hulya, who the founder of Turkey\u2019s first chain of women-only gyms, as\u00a0was the only woman selected from the Middle East and North Africa and Turkey in 2013.<\/p>\n
Hulya began her\u00a0b-fit\u00a0gym franchise in February 2006 in a middle-class neighborhood of Izmir, one of Turkey\u2019s major cities. Since then, b-fit has enabled hundreds of women to become entrepreneurs in their own right. As of today, there are 160,000 gym members at 220 gyms around the country, staffed by over 500 women employees and 250 women franchisee in 47 cities in Turkey and Cyprus.<\/p>\n
One of Hulya\u2019s strategic approaches is to make the gym a platform for the empowerment of women through exercise, education and entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n
\u201cReceiving awards like Schwab motivates us in our challenging emerging-market conditions. Although b-fit is sometimes considered discriminative because of its women-only model, we believe that in order to close the huge gender gap in countries like Turkey, where there are neither quotas nor positive discrimination policies for women, we have to provide specific tools focusing on women\u2019s development,\u201d Hulya told me in a recent conversation in her home city of Istanbul. \u201cI\u2019m always looking for women partners in the Middle East and North Africa to bring our services to more women in the region.\u201d<\/p>\n
Klaus Schwab, a\u00a0German economist, and founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, established the Schwab Foundation in 1998, along with his wife Hilde,\u00a0to promote social entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n
Each year, the foundation acknowledges and supports 24 social entrepreneurs for their innovative approaches and potential for global impact. Hulya now joins the foundation\u2019s community of 234 other social entrepreneurs from 59 countries and will be an attendee at the World Economic Forum 2014.<\/p>\n
This is not her first international recognition either. She is also an\u00a0Endeavor Entrepreneur,\u00a0a member of\u00a0KADIGER, the Women Entrepreneurs Association of Turkey,\u00a0and was honoured as a\u00a02012 fellow\u00a0by\u00a0Ashoka Turkey, a U.S.-based non-profit supporting social entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n
Hulya\u2019s success stands as a strong model for women across the region, showing that there is no limit to our ability to create global successes. I look forward to following her and other women entrepreneurs as they continue to build social enterprises across the region.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
Gulay Ozkan has more than 12 years of experience in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Turkey. She was one of the key figures behind Turkey\u2019s first technology incubation center, launched by Ericsson in 2000, where she worked\u00a0with leading telecoms operators from China to South America. In 2007, Gulay founded GEDS Business, a tech startup and innovation consultancy company focused on Europe and the Middle East. She is also the founding president of a Turkish project-management NGO called PMI TR, and she holds a BSc and an MSc in electrical engineering from ITU in Turkey and UNL-Lincoln in the U.S. She can be found on\u00a0her website\u00a0or on Twitter at @GulayOzkan.<\/p>\n
via Bedriye Hulya of Turkey Named Social Entrepreneur of the Year | Wamda.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Gulay Ozkan, February 20, 2013 Entrepreneurship in Turkey is being celebrated on the global stage once again, as the\u00a0World Economic Forum\u2019s\u00a0Schwab Foundation\u00a0has just awarded\u00a0Bedriye Hulya\u00a0an award for\u00a0Social Entrepreneur of the Year.\u00a0Hulya, who the founder of Turkey\u2019s first chain of women-only gyms, as\u00a0was the only woman selected from the Middle East and North Africa and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":66175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[846],"tags":[8846,8847,4403],"class_list":["post-66174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-bedriye-hulya","tag-gulay-ozkan","tag-women-directors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}