Mohamed Mahmoud Hafez

Hafez grew up in Qena, a small city in Upper Egypt. Being a part of various programs and projects helped him develop his personal and professional skills. Over the past five years he has experienced working and volunteering with different organizations on programs that worked on various issues and topics such as livelihood, entrepreneurship, culture, and women empowerment.

Hafez’s passion has always been creating positive change in people’s lives. He is particularly interested in working with people who live in vulnerable situations or who are affected by society’s conditions. His interest in the field of development led him to join the Lazord Fellowship, in order to be surrounded and supported by a network of fellows and alumni, to help him grow, gain more knowledge, and obtain more experience. His focus is mainly on economic empowerment and, more recently, on providing access to quality education for children and youth.

Khuzama Wardeh

Khuzama graduated in 2018 as Environmental Engineering from Al Baath University, Syria. Shortly thereafter, she immersed herself in the field of sustainability, renewable energy, and energy transition, recognising the synergy between engineering, sustainability, economics, and politics through her work and research. She is now pursuing a master’s in engineering for International Development at University College London, a step that advances her academic and professional aspirations in the international context.

Ghada Abd al-Aziz

Ghada is originally from Alexandria and is a wanderer with a speck of wonder. Her BSc in Architecture allowed her to gain technical skills that helped her to understand, analyze, and design. She is not fixated on designing what does not already exist, and thus works on what is around her; she applies this way of working to both cities and buildings. Through workshops, she worked on getting hands-on experience in building with mud in Siwa and Fayoum, gaining an understanding about communities rooted in self-dependency. Through guidance, she learned to see the importance of the intersection between technical and social sciences; from this point on she has been working on finding this intersectionality in fields related to communities and the built-up realm.

Yara Osman

Yara started working in sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) as a local officer in her university where she held several on-ground campaigns for two years. She later became the national officer assistant, during which she was the focal point for the International Federation of Medical Students Associations (IFMSA) and delivered workshops in several universities. She continued her work on an international level as a development assistant where she handled the approval and evaluation of all SRHR workshops globally, as well overseeing a small working group that created a manual for HIV advocacy and educational training. Lastly, she became the regional assistant of SRHR, where she worked with 13 countries in the MENA region. She executed 5 digital awareness campaigns, oversaw a 3-day regional meeting, delivered workshops and activated two new countries. Through the Lazord Fellowship, she is placed at UNAIDS as the Partnerships and Resource Mobilization Assistant.

Iman Elhadidi

Iman obtained her Bachelor of Economics from Cairo University in 2019, with a passion for human rights and migration studies. After graduating, she started having multiple consultancy opportunities to work with migrants and refugees in Egypt in the different fields of education, livelihoods, entrepreneurship, and social inclusion. Thanks to the Lazord Fellowship, she was placed at the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Egypt, where she became more aware of the different phases of the grant-provision process as well as the hardships migrants experience living in Egypt. Her future goal is to work towards improving the quality of life for the most vulnerable to enable them to live in safety and dignity, and to have access to decent work and living conditions.

Other than her formal work path, Iman is deeply concerned with animal rights and advocates for making choices that create a kinder world for animals.

Mariam Dahab

Mariam’s story started when her grandfather moved from Nubia to Alexandria more than 6O years ago to search for a better life. Mariam was born and raised in Alexandria. As a Nubian girl, it seemed like she had good luck, better opportunities in education, and roads to explore arts and culture in life. However, she believes that history has a tendency to repeat itself. As memory fades, events from the past can become events of the present. Exploring origins, roots, and history is what has moved her forward in most of her life and educational experiences. After choosing to study fine arts, she specialized in sculpture. Through this, she explored her connection with clay, connecting back to her Nubian roots, as clay used for sculpture in Egypt comes from Aswan.

She decided that her mission and purpose in life was to take advantage of various opportunities and experiences, to go back to Nubia to share what she has learned, and to start a learning community. She believes that if people feel that you trust their knowledge, culture, and work for their needs, rather than for your own plans, they will in turn trust and support you. Mariam is planning to gain more knowledge and skills that will help her achieve her purpose. She wishes to create a space for informal education, peace building, and a learning community where knowledge is shared between women, families and generations, in order to preserve language, culture and history; she hopes to help her community create their own way for sustainable development through their own efforts.

Mariam perceives this fellowship as an opportunity to interact through a network of colleagues, alumni, and mentors from diverse professional backgrounds and cultures coming from all over Egypt. She perceives networking as a very important step to integrate different experiences.

Merna Youssef Kamal Aziz

Reem Gabr

Reem is an environmental advocate with more than three years of expertise in environmental sustainability and social entrepreneurship, with a focus on green social enterprises. In addition, she is a co-founder of Recyclizer, a start-up that recycles plastic waste into a product that protects agricultural crops from harm. Reem obtained a bachelor’s degree in English from the Faculty of Arts. Along the way, Reem made the decision to focus on Environmental Communications, which is the study and application of how individuals, cultures, and organisations relate to and influence the environment. This communication entails a range of encounters, from verbal exchanges with others to media coverage of environmental issues.