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ets such as MENA, the concerns are much more fundamental. Many countries lack legal traditions and frameworks to ensure that investors are adequately protected, dominant shareholders play by the rules, and boards understand and fulfill their role. Moreover, in most developing countries stock markets are in their infancy and have a limited role in the economy and as a tool for raising capital, so applying corporate governance only to listed private companies misses the point. In MENA, for instance, state-owned enterprises account for a significant portion of GDP and family-owned and other small and medium-sized enterprises comprise the bulk of all firms. How to show the value of good corporate governance to companies that are not using stock exchanges to raise capital is one of the key challenges facing reformers.

Recognizing both the importance of corporate governance reform in the region as well as regional needs, priorities, and limitations, CIPE saw that strengthening corporate governance in MENA required more than translating international principles, standards, and regulations into the local language. In a large part, this was a reflection on the opinion of the private sector leaders in Egypt who began pushing discussions on corporate governance reforms in cooperation with CIPE.

It was clear that in order to be successful the development of corporate governance institutions had to go beyond the transfer of international best practices and the provision of services to the leading edge firms - the few that saw a clear benefit of reform. The first step had to be nurturing the local understanding of what corporate governance is and how it might benefit companies, economies, governments, and societies. This was crucial in creating a broader domestic constituency that would take ownership of and promote the reform process. Doing so would provide the conditions necessary for the engagement of local stakeholders who understood the constraints and possibilities for change within the existing institutional frameworks. This is precisely how CIPE set out to proceed.

The Hawkama Initiative - More than a Word
The lack of a proper Arabic term for corporate governance was officially recognized by Dr. Youssef Boutros Ghali, current Egyptian Minister of Finance, and Minister of Foreign Trade during a CIPE conference in Cairo held in partnership with the Egyptian Capital Market Association and the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies on October 24, 2001. It was the second corporate governance conference ever held in Egypt, following up on the first event organized in October 2000 by the Federation of Egyptian Industries. Dr. Ghali stated in his opening remarks, 'The first challenge I have found is that there is no Arabic equivalent for the word [governance].The problem is not just semantic, because when we don't have a word to express a concept, then the concept does not exist in our daily life.'

Subsequently, CIPE, Egyptian Capital Market Association, and the Ministry of Foreign Trade supported the formation of a committee of experts to develop a term for approval by the Arabic Linguists Council composed of Arabic linguistics professionals from across the region. After much deliberation and consultation that lasted more than a year, hawkamat ash-sharikat, literally 'the governance of companies,' was created as the Arabic term for corporate governance. When using the term 'govern