Farha Alaa

Farha received her Bachelor’s Degree in Humanities, Sociology Department in 2022. She has a strong belief in the power of education and how it can provide children and youth with the skills and knowledge they need to build a brighter future for themselves and their families.

Farha has been interested in social development since a very young age, and thus, she has been volunteering for the last nine years in social development projects. Her interest in education made her volunteer in several educational projects including educational programs in Ezbet Abu-Qarn and Ezbet Khair-Allah.

She also worked for three years as a character-building teacher for kids trying to make them discover their strengths and potential. She’s been a trainer’s coordinator at Science Crafts for Educational Solutions for over a year. Currently as a Lazord Fellow, she is placed at GIZ in Technical Support for the Comprehensive Technical Education Initiative (TCTI) project.

Veronia Gerges

Veronia has a Bachelor’s Degree in Physiotherapy.

She is passionate about refining a future worths living for all people, especially those in vulnerable situations. On the grounds of this, she started working with refugees in projects of the Egyptian Health Ministry and volunteering in BPRM and UNICEF’s projects, and that grew her passion for refugees’ right to a better life and access to their basic needs.

Believing in the impact of education, Veronia’s placement is in the Save the Children education project as a Lazord fellow. Matching her passion with her work and enjoying the change that happens in students’ lives, as much as enjoying skills obtained from the fellowship.

Nawal Bahaa

As a truth seeker Nawal has always been eager to know the “why” behind everything: Why is life the way it is? Why are people the way they are? Why is life is sometimes not fair? The urge to answer these questions led her to certain paths in life: education, entrepreneurship sustainability and social research. Therefore, while in college, she volunteered in student organizations and worked on education and research-related development projects. Her experiences have led her to the conclusion that she dreams of contributing to the community development sector as a development practitioner.

Khouloud Faizy

Khouloud works to create change in the health care services, for them to be human-centered and gender oriented. She graduated as a midwife from the higher school of health sciences and techniques in 2021. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in human rights and international humanitarian law, in parallel with a master’s degree in governance of public policy. In 2021, she won the Ambassador for a Day competition that was organized by the British Embassy in Tunisia. She co-founded an independent movement, Ambassadors for Equality, which provides programs to empower underserved girls and young women to claim their rights and create a healthier environment where they can live free from discrimination and violence. She and her team implemented two programs, TeenGirlsLead and Power Voices Challenge.

Khoulud’s journey with the Academy of National Dialogue (AND) began in 2020 as a project manager. She managed a team, organized and moderated 2 seminars about gender equality and women’s rights, one in collaboration with the municipality of Tunis, and the other in collaboration with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), where she demonstrated great public speaking and team-work skills. She also organized and moderated online seminars about education, environment and local authority after the pandemic. She is a trainer in human rights, gender equality, and democracy, and has facilitated workshops and dialogue sessions on different subjects.

Ghazoua Selmi

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 Alhulayil

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 Hasan

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 Gamal

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 Ellaban

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 Abdullah

Manar Issam Abdullah is a passionate humanist, civil engineer, and advocate for positive social change, holding a degree from the University of Jordan.

Throughout her career, she has been committed to driving educational and charitable projects aimed at improving lives and fostering a better future for underprivileged communities. Her journey into community service officially began when she became the lead coordinator of The Camp of Gaza Support Campaign (TCGSC), where she worked to empower disadvantaged children and adolescents through education, health awareness, and essential life skills. This role honed her leadership, adaptability, and strategic planning abilities, reinforcing her commitment to championing child rights, education, women’s empowerment, and the welfare of refugee communities.

Stemming from her belief that music is a universal language that unites people, she also pursued and earned a diploma in ‘oud,’ reflecting her dedication to cultural connection.

Manar later worked with the Madrasati Initiative for nearly two years, where she focused on improving the physical and educational environments in some of Jordan’s most underprivileged public schools. Her groundbreaking research on “Period Poverty among Women in Poverty Pockets in Mafraq Governorate, Jordan” became a milestone in her career. This eight-month research project, the first of its kind in Jordan and the Middle East, won national recognition through the Lazord Fellowship competition.

In her current role, Manar leads the Jordan Young Scientists (JoYS) initiative at the Embassy of Ireland in Jordan, a national programme aimed at inspiring and rewarding young people who excel in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology. Under her leadership, the JoYS initiative, which is modeled after a 60-year-old programme in Ireland, has expanded its impact in Jordan, motivating students to apply scientific knowledge in innovative ways.

In addition to her role as the lead coordinator for JoYS, Manar also heads the Green Team at the Embassy of Ireland, spearheading sustainability initiatives. The team focuses on improving environmental practices within the embassy and the residence, setting yearly goals and benchmarks to advance sustainability efforts.

Manar is also a strong advocate for climate resilience and sustainability in Jordan. Most recently, she authored a position paper on “The Effect of Climate Change on Agriculture Sustainability in Jordan,” which she presented as the moderator and main speaker to both the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Environment. Her work on this topic underscores her commitment to addressing one of the most pressing global challenges—climate change—and its local impacts.