An accomplished and driven individual, known for her unwavering determination and profound commitment to making a positive impact. With a Master’s degree in English literature and a trailbazing career in diverse fields, Ghazoua has garnered recognition and admiration for her achievements and contributions.
Mu’taz holds a degree in business administration from Yarmouk University in Jordan. Since his early childhood, he was drawn to community service activities. He is a hard-working and proactive individual with strong problem-solving and communication skills and the ability to learn new concepts fast. He is very passionate about community service projects and has been involved in many projects as a volunteer in youth support and women empowerment programs with different NGOs in Jordan. He believes that the most important factors for success in the career life are to love your field, desire and perseverance to learn, and to have a short and long-term vision that you strive to achieve.
Abeer is a passionate, hardworking, and professional individual who holds an excellent degree in translation and interpretation. Abeer is an alumna of the MEPI Student Leaders Program, a one-year program that includes a five-week residency in the United States. Abeer is also an alumna of the Access Microscholarship Program, a US Embassy program consisting of 400 academic hours, that took place at World Associates. Her personal and professional achievements allowed her to do a professional training in project management, which gave her the opportunity to implement a successful teaching project at SOS Village in Irbid, made possible by a generous fund from the U.S Embassy in Amman.
What really makes Abeer stand out is her continuous willingness to share the knowledge she gets. She always prefers that information should not stop when it reaches her; she feels the responsibility of reciprocity.
Ahlam has a B.A. in Fine Arts from the Graphic Department/Animation and Book Art. She is interested in culture and arts and their role in societal change as the primary drivers for expressing ideas and needs. She strongly believes in the role of the arts in developing societies in a way that includes and allows all individuals to be honest, equal, open and confident in themselves and in others.
Through the Lazord Fellowship she works as a cultural coordinator with Collective Routes. Her role is to provide support for the implementation of projects and support in planning, monitoring and evaluating project activities, providing visual content for various tools and researches, and working on developing cultural work and making it available to the community.
She was the program coordinator for community empowerment at Ruwwad, which works to empower young people through their learning journeys and enhances their role in community participation and services. Her role was to design educational processes for women in eradicating illiteracy, promoting free education, empowerment, and awareness of their issues.
She is on the national team of ambassadors of National Dialogue Egypt, which works to promote a culture of dialogue and peaceful coexistence, as they believe that dialogue is a type of art people use to express their ideas to reach solutions and ideas on how to develop society without excluding any of its members.
She also works on documenting the oral heritage of marginalized areas in order to revive them as an important part of the country’s culture in that they give us events from the point of view of people from the street where they differ or agree with the reliable historical vision of historians. She created a website to document the oral literature of one of the slums in Egypt. Also, her graduation project was an illustrated story of an Egyptian folk story of a young Egyptian hero “Ali Al-Zeibaq”.
She was a co-founder in establishing a cinema space in the Old Cairo area to raise awareness of gender, using cinema with the Art Association for Development. Among the Fael Cultural Program, which works at the regional level to spread culture and arts in complex societies, from the “Action for Hope” organization, she believes that culture and the arts have an effective role in spreading coexistence among members of society, as well as the need for cultural relief for youth and children in various regions, especially marginalized areas.
Nadine is a passionate individual in the development field. Nadine started her journey with the development field when she was granted an exchange program scholarship under the name of KL-YES program. Nadine was placed in the state of Massachusetts in the United States where she started volunteering and engaging with the society in which she lived. Moreover, Nadine was chosen for the Civic Education Workshop held in Washington D.C. At the end of her exchange program, Nadine was granted a certificate from the department of state as a reward for volunteering for more than 100 hours during her exchange year. After Nadine returned to Egypt, she completed her undergraduate studies in political science.
At the heels of earning a BSc in Political Science and completing a thesis for women empowerment, Nadine was granted the Lazord Fellowship and is currently placed at GIZ Egypt in the Employment Promotion Unit. Nadine aspires to be part of empowering the women of Egypt and enhancing the quality of education inside Egypt.
If she had a superpower, she would want it to be the ability to end poverty in order to make the world a better place.
Manar Issam Abdullah is a passionate soul, a dedicated humanist and an ambitious civil engineer who graduated from the University of Jordan. She has always been involved in organizing and facilitating educational and charity projects with the goal of making the world a better place in mind. Moreover, during her university years she participated in different charity activities with several foundations, but her official journey started when she became a lead coordinator at The Camp of Gaza Support Campaign (TCGSC) to help the camp residents, especially disadvantaged children and adolescents, to achieve better education, to elevate their local health awareness levels, and to gain essential life skills.
This experience allowed her to improve her skills in leadership, adaptability and strategic planning. She has always aimed to become an agent of change in the fields of child’s rights, education, women empowerment, and supporting the welfare of refugee communities. Furthermore, stemming from her belief that music is a universal language that brings humans closer, she studied and practiced to get her ‘oud’ instrument diploma.
She worked with Madrasati Initiative for almost two years to help improve the physical and educational learning environments of Jordan’s most underprivileged public schools.
For eight months, she worked hard on the Lazord Final Research Project titled, “Period Poverty among Women in Poverty Pockets in Mafraq Governorate, Jordan,” a project that was the first of its kind in Jordan and the Middle East. Her group won at the national competition, and were qualified to compete at the regional competition.
Manar has started a new chapter in her life by working with the Embassy of Ireland in Jordan to help improve educational learning environments across Jordan and promote the annual Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition (STEM-related) in Jordan, which was launched in Ireland over 50 years ago. All of these aspects and experiences have aided her in becoming the person she is today.
In addition, Manar is responsible for the green team at the Embassy of Ireland. Green team has started setting yearly reviews to get baselines to understand what is needed and how to improve on aspects in both the embassy and the residence.
Most recently, Manar worked on a position paper, “The Effect of Climate Change on Agriculture Sustainability in Jordan.” She was the moderator and the main speaker who presented this paper to the Minister of Agriculture as well as the Minister of Environment in Jordan.
Multiple circumstances, life changes, lessons, loss, lies, and too many other things to count have shaped AlMuthana (Dr. Alex) into the person he is today.
The person who he is today is a result of living in three different countries, dealing with people and cultures all around the world, having the insight of a doctor who tells him how the human body works and how to deal with the human being at his weakest, combining being a human and curing one. One sphere of knowledge won’t grant you success and that one sphere is not enough to proceed in life and have an impact upon others’ lives.
Becoming a Lazord Fellow put Dr. Alex in a test that sculpted his skills and gave him insight into what he is capable of learning and doing, implementing his skills, and coming up with a more aware person of what is the meaning of an opportunity, and giving it to himself.
He became a Lazord Fellow to be a part of a community that holds two important words as an aim. “Responsible leader” sees that the first word is scary to state but yet the second one is tempting to hold. Dr. Alex believes that the way to achieve your dreams and ambitions is taking responsibility for your own actions and leading yourself to greatness by learning and spreading the knowledge a person can gain.
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Dr. Alex is a very sophisticated person that has always pushed himself beyond the traditional paths of life and stereotypical life He didn’t limit his life choices within his major but he also went beyond to discover, develop skills and experiences in other aspects that made him involved and evolve in the social and management of life aspects in three different countries. When he started his journey in Medicine he had the honour to claim the position of the Batch leader and advancing all the way to become the first-ever foreign president of the faculty of his university where he worked thoroughly with students and their well-being, academic development. Dr. Alex also became a TV host to spread awareness on matters that help maintain the original concept of humanity and working hard.
“Once you stop learning, you stop living” – Dr. Al Muthana Mufleh
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.
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.
Oussama, “Jaz,” is a motivated and highly resilient ESL teacher and debate trainer, who is engaged in skills development and personal development, especially with youth.