Georgetown SFS-Q Hosts ‘Stories of Women-Led Change in MENA’

Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar (SFS-Q) hosted a forward-looking panel discussion by ‘Vital Voices Global Partnership’ (Vital Voices), an international, non-profit initiative set up to empower women within their communities, to an enthusiastic audience on Sunday.

The special evening looked at the work Vital Voices is doing with women in the MENA region to support advocates in implementing locally-grown and led campaigns for change in their communities. Vital Voices regularly hosts international forums, capacity-building workshops, and training seminars for women, and working in partnership with ‘Women Leading Change – Qatar’ uses Qatar as an ideal platform to reach and help empower women throughout the region.

Carol Lancaster, Dean of School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C., and Vice Chair of Vital Voices, took the opportunity to stress on the university’s desire to support the organisation, “Vital Voices has been supporting women all over the world for several years now, and raising awareness of grass-roots level campaigns improving our communities is critical at a time of great change and challenge in the region. The insights gained tonight were not only engaging and thought provoking, but will inspire others to go out and work towards the empowerment of women in the Middle East and North Africa.” Gerd Nonneman, Dean SFS-Q introduced the three women participating in the discussion, “The Journey Through Transition: Stories of Women-Led Change in the Middle East and North Africa”; Randa Naffa, MarieJoe Raidy and Houda Khaznaji represent advocacy efforts in its various forms and stages in Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia respectively. They spoke about the great efforts they have made, as well as a model for change and their vision for their communities. Their stories provided a unique look into the power that women and civil society have to make change and taught lessons about how to engage in a positive and meaningful way.

Shareefa Fadhel from ‘Roudha Center’, a strategic partner of ‘Women Leading Change – Qatar’, spoke about the role of women as peaceful agents for change, “Women in particular play a hugely important role in facilitating change and the best way to help them enact this is through economic empowerment. Roudha Center has been working to increase the number of women in the workforce in Qatar, be it into existing corporations or starting their own businesses. We are already beginning to see the fruits of these efforts which is very encouraging.”

A cause clearly taken up by the next generation of Qatari women, a special presentation was later given by Ghada Al-Subaey and Zarqa Parvez students from SFS-Q about their project and research initiative which looks at improving the work – life balance for women in Qatar.

Ghada Al-Subaey commented, “In line with the Qatar 2012-2016 National Vision, our project is aimed at encouraging more women in Qatar, and especially Qatari women, to pursue careers. 63% of the Qatari population in our university is female, so clearly there are a lot of educated women in the population. However, at present not enough of these women are entering the workplace. We hope that our project will go forward in improving this.”

Zaraq Parvez went onto talk about the project in more detail, “Around 34% of Qatari women work; our hope is that this percentage increases to 42% in the coming years. In order to get bench marks as to the current situation regarding working women in Qatar, we will begin by conducting research. We will also study best practices in other countries and with our research outcomes look to adapt them to suit Qatar’s culture and life-style. The aim is to develop family friendly work solutions that suit the needs and circumstances of women in Qatar. Once we have this model we will then test the proposal in one locally based institution and later present to other institutions to implement.”