Region: United Arab Emirates
Raheela Khan
Raheela Khan is Director of Business Development and Strategy at R2 Business Advisory Consultants, a multidisciplinary consultancy. She facilitates value chains and the strategic implementation of DEI frameworks between Canada, Pakistan, and the Middle East, promoting effective, responsible funding for financial inclusion to bring about profitable social change. Currently based in Vancouver, Raheela has initiated and led community awareness programs on the importance of cultural confidence, integration, diversity and avoidance of self-exclusion. Her current initiatives are borne of her experiences of being a mother of two, which she uses to offer support to new mothers with postpartum depression as well as new immigrants and refugees. Canada's open border policies, offering…
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Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi
Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi is a United Arab Emirates-based columnist and researcher on social, political and cultural affairs in the Arab Gulf States. Sultan rose in prominence during the Arab Spring when his tweets became a major news source, rivaling news networks at the time, until TIME magazine listed him in the “140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2011.” In 2018 Sultan ranked 19th on the "Arabic Thought Leader Index" by Swiss think tank Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. Sultan was an MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow from 2014-2016, and in the spring of 2017 he was a practitioner in residence at the Hagop Kevorkian Center of Near East Studies at New York…
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Belabbes Benkredda
Belabbes Benkredda is an award-winning social innovator and the founder of the Munathara Initiative, the Arab world’s largest online and television debate forum highlighting voices of youth, women, and marginalized communities. Today, Munathara operates in 11 Arab countries and counts a community of some 170,000 members on its online debate platform. Its monthly prime time TV debates are the only civil society-run, independent political talk programs on Arabic television, syndicated across several channels. Previously, Belabbes held roles in the German Foreign Office, the League of Arab States, and the Council for Arab-British Understanding. After moving to Dubai in 2005, Belabbes became a government consultant specializing in public diplomacy in the…
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The Collector
The new cultural publication Hadara Magazine published a feature on Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, the founder of Sharjah’s Barjeel Art Foundation.
More InformationEpisode 21: 2018 World Fellow Sultan Al Qassemi
Sultan Al Qassemi, art collector and columnist, discusses his childhood in the United Arab Emirates, why the Arab Spring failed to bring about new political orders based on rights and justice, and his hopes for the Middle East.
More InformationEpisode 7: 2015 World Fellow Mina Al-Oraibi
Mina Al-Oraibi is Editor in Chief of The National, the Abu Dhabi-based English language newspaper discusses her career in journalism.
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